Excel vs Access

[IFCC]

Hello, I am quite new to Access and have watched a few tutorials on it.
Currently I have a database in Excel which after speaking and showing to a software creator he described it as very complicated and surprised it could handle it.
Access seems quite different and so far is hard for me to wrap my head around.
My excel sheet has many dependent lists, lookup formulas, indexing etc etc and I'm wondering if this is all doable in Access as well? Since I heard Access is the program to use for databases.


thanks

Mike

[June7]

Short answer is yes.

And yes, Access is quite different. Excel and Access are meant to be different because they serve different purposes. One can be made to work like the other, to a point.

[IFCC]

Thanks. I think it might be easier for me to hire an Access guru to change it over. Then I'm sure I can modify it's pricing when needed.

[June7]

Pros and cons. If you can afford the $50 to $100 an hour for programmer, then that is one way to go. Those hours can really add up. And then are you bound to that developer for life? Will you understand the db well enough to do future mods yourself? Make sure developer leaves an editable version.

[ItsMe]

Converting operations that depend on Excel to Operations that use Access efficiently is one of the more difficult things an RDBMS engineer can undertake. It will be a group effort between users, management, and consultant(s). An approach I sometimes employ is to define a portion of operations that can be converted. I will then create a database and app that does not consider excel but considers the business rules. This approach requires the new system to work in parallel with the old system until the new system's data is current and updated. Users input data to both the old and new systems simultaneously.

Another approach is to find a way to import the data that is in excel to the new system. The trick here is to have a new system without any bugs as well as a method to import data into a normalized structure.

[IFCC]

All good points. One thing I have thought about is I would need to do an extensive business logic table in order for a programmer even to begin to understand the many tiered system of each product.

thanks for the advice