Microsoft Excel – A Love-Hate Relationship
We’ve all fallen in love with Microsoft Excel. And why not?
It’s an easy enough to use application that allows you to quickly enter your data in a tabular format. It’s one of those applications that you can open up and get to work right away without having to learn to much. It’s common enough that just about every office will have it, and you can bet that if you send one of those beloved .XLXS files to someone else, they’ll be able to open it up without a problem. Well, it’s the same reasons we love Excel that make it one of the most misused applications.
Because it is so readily available and, on the surface easy to use, people try to use it for just about everything you can imagine. Now don’t get me wrong here… Excel has earned its place in the Microsoft suite of Office applications. If you need some statistical analysis or fancy graphs and charts, you’re using the right application. However, if you’re using it to create forms, logs, or any kind of records, then you are creating records. And records belong in a database.
Microsoft Access is a “Relational Table Database Management System” that allows you to create many tables to include as much data as you like.
Where it is superior to Excel, and why I say to use it for any type of record keeping, is that is allows you to cross-reference tables. This means that you can pull information in many more ways than Excel and, most importantly, in the ways that you actually need to see them. To illustrate this point, let’s use a simple example of a sales log from a T-shirt vendor.
In this example, an entrepreneur is recording sales in their spreadsheet as they are happening. The variable information here (that which could change for each transaction) includes the sales date, Item SKU, and quantity. The “Unit Cost” and “Description” are fixed and dependent upon the selection of the “Item SKU”. The “Ext Cost” column is simply a calculated value based on the unit cost and quantity purchased.
Microsoft Access is a “Relational Table Database Management System” that allows you to create many tables to include as much data as you like. Where it is superior to Excel, and why I say to use it for any type of record keeping, is that is allows you to cross-reference tables. This means that you can pull information in many more ways than Excel and, most importantly, in the ways that you actually need to see them. To illustrate this point, let’s use a simple example of a sales log from a T-shirt vendor