If you have lots of data and you’re not sure whether to use excel or access then hopefully this will help you. They are very similar and the main difference is that excel is good for having one list, for example list of people, list of customers, a list of songs and access is good when you have 2 or more lists and they need to be joined together.
Both access and excel can be used for calculations, for example if you have a list of books and the price for each one you can quite easy calculate the total amount for the books. They’re also both quite good for laying out the data and putting in a something suitable for printing. One reason you might use access rather than excel is if you are going to keep adding to the data. With access you can keep adding data at the bottom of a table and any queries that you’ve made or any reports that you’ve designed still work. They just use the new data and its already included where as with excel you have to insert the data somewhere by making extra rows in the middle and adding it.
If you’re just doing something very quick such as there is an event and you want to know which staff want to go to the show, you can just make a quick list on excel. You just put a check next to each person who wants to go to the show and maybe how much they paid then its much easy on excel and its very simple to do. If you have something on the other hand were they pay weekly, for example they’re saving up for holiday and all the staff are going and each week they pay you some money the Access will be better. Sometimes some staff don’t pay and other weeks they might pay double or pay more so it is better to use because you can just keep adding how much they paid and automatically it will show you how much they owe or how much is paid so far.
Excel is much easier to learn because it is just looks like a piece of paper and you’ve just got columns along the top and rows down the side. You can just enter the data and make a sum of the total amount at the bottom or even halfway through and a grand total at the end. The difficulty people have with access or any other database is deciding how the tables connect together but it’s actually not as difficult as everyone thinks.
