Excel or Access?

[Domn8r]

I have been using excel and vba (somewhat blindly) for a little while and have found it on the whole quite user friendly and diverse.

I often find however, that the types of things I would like to do with my excel files, require more than a basic knowledge of VBA.

Several people have suggested that Access is beter suited to the types of things I am trying to achieve; I usually am trying to manage files, jobs or assets and have the records presented nicely, easy to navigate and user friendly.
I have looked at Access and to be honest found it a little daunting; and not really knowing where to start.
I like the way you can play around in excel and build funcionality and appearance as you go.

So my question, to the MrExcel community; Would you advise me to concentrate on learning more about Excel and VBA programming, or start using and learning Access properly?



Let the debate begin........

 

[Domski]

There's no real straight answer to this question. You can often achieve similar things in Access as in Excel but you have to remember that they are essentially different types of application.

Access is a straightforward relational database and as such is, simply put, about normalising the data, creating the required tables and defining the relationships between the data tables.

Excel is capable of acting as a database but as such is not designed from the ground up to do so.

In the end it all depends what you want your application to do as to which would be the more suitable to use. From your description of what your work normally involves I would find it hard to say which I would suggest.

Access can be a bit daunting to begin with (as can Excel if you are not familiar with it) but if you want to start using it I would suggest getting hold of a book on database design and trying to get your head round the theory of what I mentioned above.

Dom

 

[SydneyGeek]

As Dom said, Excel and Access do very different things.

Access organises multiple topics and concepts with relative ease. Excel struggles with correlating more than a couple of related groups.
Access can hold much more data than Excel.
Access is also much better if you have multiple users. Ever tried shared workbooks?
Access gives you a lot more control over data entry, access, and security.
Excel leaves Access in the dust when you need to calculate along a row (for a database; read, 'across many fields'), and for ad-hoc analysis and charting it's definitely superior.

Work out what you really need to do. Knowing how to use Access is a very useful skill, and becomes even more useful if you know VBA because much of the power of Access comes through using VBA to control what users can do in the database. I use both Excel and Access every day, and wouldn't be without either.

Denis