Excel or Access? Which do you use more for business apps?

 

Excel.

Unless you're using thousands of lines of data, access is a bit much to develop. Typically, if I'm building a model (financial, resourcing, sensitivity. . . etc), I need to have it done in a matter of hours. Access would take way too long to work into a useable model. Much easier to data dump and analyze using Excel too. Honestly, in 5 years of consulting, I've used Access once, and it was only to build a glorified phonebook/meeting attendance sign-in sheet. I use Excel every day.

 

Use Excel much more. Most of the compainies that I have worked for have various BI tools (like Hyperion) that eliminates the need for Access. The ability to query huge data bases is almost effortless. When I run a SQL from a data base I import to Excel. It is very friendly to a pipe delimited file.

 

Excel. I use it all the time, even though I don't do anything fancy with it.

 

Excel by far. Access is very rare usage for us. All our major business databases are on-line in SAP (mainframe-ish interface).

 

For everyday financials Excel is the std in corp america. I seem to have a sheet open at all times at work and at home.

At my job I need manipulate raw data from a HUGE Oracle database so I built a macro with GUI in Access that gives me what I need quickly. Oracle is too slow and you need a PhD to modify it on the fly.

Access is great at filtering huge flat files into a "current" or parametered snapshot.

 

Excel. But the problem with Excel is that it can only handle twenty some odd thousand lines per worksheet...

 

excel.

i work in a very large company with peoplesoft.

problem is, we often have a lot of financial data to go through. excel's 32-bit addressing scheme limits it to 65,556 lines which is not enough in many cases.

I develop many Access models (using the full capability of visual basic) for analysing a lot of data. I built a model that spits out our companies operating plan ($2B a year company) based on variables input into forms for hundreds of departments. We could do that in PeopleSoft, but we'd have to pay through the nose for the customization. Having me around to solve the problems in Access cheaply makes me valuable to them

Honestly, it doesn't take a lot of time to set up a simple access database. it takes less time than using 10 excel workbooks to analyze half a million lines of data, that's for sure.

Excel is the ruler for the simler analyses. 99% of office pros out there have no idea how to use access...and only a few of the 1% can do anything substantial.