Excel versus Access

OK. Let me begin by saying that I am like all the other 3,999,999 Office users out there, in thinking that Excel is about as cool as cool gets. Excel is friendly, intuitive, "come on in, the water's fine." Excel is familiar.

Access, by contrast, seems cold, dark, distant, and mysterious, "don't go in there, you might get hurt..." kind of a sense. Access doesn't understand Excel's Undo. Access feels foreboding.

Access talks in strange terms, like "referential integrity" and "bound column," while Excel uses friendly, familiar terms like "column" and "row."

But here's the secret, friends: they're both useful. Both have their place and their good.

Excel is useful for two reasons: number one, because it's relatively easy to get in there and start working. Reason number two, because it's great for financial modeling.

Access is also useful for two reasons: number one, because it handles immensely complex, interrelated data with relative ease. Number two, because it make your finished product look like a stand-alone application, with much of the dark underside of functionality hidden from the user.

If I had to keep a list of customers, with names, phone numbers, and addresses, I'd just use Excel.

If I had to interrelate those customers, their orders, the products ordered, the shippers who sent the orders, and the employees who took the orders, I'd go with Access.

I just wanted to give a shout out of warning to those who try to avoid having to use Access by doing complex, processor-intensive VLOOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, and OFFSET functions to get a result. The biggest problem you'll run into is that you're needlessly replicating the functionality that Access gives you right out of the box.

Let it.