Excel -vs- Access

[Bill Martin]

Is there a rule of thumb as to how big an accumulation of data one needs before
it becomes better to use Access rather than Excel sheets?

I have workbooks with say 100 sheets of pretty much fixed data in a 100x50
matrix, and then several sheets that actually do calculation on that data. Each
day I add another sheet. At what point is it worth the effort to split the
thing into an Access database, and an Excel workbook that analyzes the data?

It works fine now, but continues to get slower and slower to load and store.

Thanks.

Bill

 

[Dave O]

This will be an interesting discussion. Other points to consider are:
how comfortable are you with Access, and how comfortable is your backup
staff or successor (if you go on vacation, who does the work?). You
also need to consider the conversion from Excel to Access, which will
probably include concurrent processing to make sure the new system
matches the old, so there is duplicate work involved.

 

[Bill Martin]

This will be an interesting discussion. Other points to consider are:
how comfortable are you with Access, and how comfortable is your backup
staff or successor (if you go on vacation, who does the work?). You
also need to consider the conversion from Excel to Access, which will
probably include concurrent processing to make sure the new system
matches the old, so there is duplicate work involved.

I have never used Access so it would be pure learning curve. Nobody else is
involved with this -- I'm self employed and thus I am my own entire IT staff. I
do run incremental backups of all data on my whole system every night however.

Bill

 

[Guest]

My rule of thumb of Excel vs Access is entirely around how much and how often
you want to separate the data. Access is super powerful for easily giving
you the data that meets certain criteria. (The more criteria you want to
sort/segment by the more you should use Access.) If you are doing database
work I would suggest getting familiar with Access as again, it is super
powerful.

Be warned Access is not as intuitive as Excel, and does have a steeper
learning curve. A class or two would probably be well worth while in terms
of saved blood sweat and tears if you go that route.

Joe