“You know, the company is getting a bit too big and heavy to keep all our books in Excel.” What is there to go to beyond that? Lease an IBM AS/400, hire a team of COBOL programmers and have them build a bespoke system for you? Something Something SQL?
Back when I was going to school, every single one of us got one semester in middle school and one semester in high school on MS Office. That was 20 years ago. There’s two, two-and-a-half generations of us who are trained to use Excel as the most computing we can do, like if you need a computer to do math you use the calculator app or Excel. If you need to compute more than Excel can, you hire an IT team and a database administrator and such.
Something like Microsoft Access is literally built to be a database, while I don’t have experience personally with that program, I’ve heard it’s miles better for that type of work than excel
Access has the benefit that it allows you to build a front end and can have a relational database on the back end. You also can use real databases such as SQL. So it’s definitely better in that regard than Excel.
But of course it also has it’s limits in terms of speed and efficiency. I’ve definitely seen Access solutions which should have ported to a proper one years ago.
Okay let me ask the question:
“You know, the company is getting a bit too big and heavy to keep all our books in Excel.” What is there to go to beyond that? Lease an IBM AS/400, hire a team of COBOL programmers and have them build a bespoke system for you? Something Something SQL?
Back when I was going to school, every single one of us got one semester in middle school and one semester in high school on MS Office. That was 20 years ago. There’s two, two-and-a-half generations of us who are trained to use Excel as the most computing we can do, like if you need a computer to do math you use the calculator app or Excel. If you need to compute more than Excel can, you hire an IT team and a database administrator and such.
Something like Microsoft Access is literally built to be a database, while I don’t have experience personally with that program, I’ve heard it’s miles better for that type of work than excel
Access has the benefit that it allows you to build a front end and can have a relational database on the back end. You also can use real databases such as SQL. So it’s definitely better in that regard than Excel.
But of course it also has it’s limits in terms of speed and efficiency. I’ve definitely seen Access solutions which should have ported to a proper one years ago.
Government runs on Access.