If you’re saying you disagree with the statement in the post title, so do I.

This was an off-the-cuff post, and maybe I didn’t make it clear enough: For most people and for most purposes, Excel (or its competitors) has become the most appropriate database tool available. My brother has linked workbooks for his role as a church treasurer; I use linked spreadsheets within a workbook (OK, I’m sloppy, I called them pages within a spreadsheet) all the time; and my crude household accounting tools are in Excel. (Checkbook balancing I do on paper.)

What I’m basically saying is that the old assertion that you should always use a DBMS for databases, which may never have been true, is now false for many, probably most household and small-scale databases. I think you agree with that.

Yes, Access can do some things better, but the amount of time to invest in learning which is then not transferable to anything else, and the re-learning I need to do each time I go back to it (after a 6 – 18 month absence) means that I use Excel for a lot.

One of my favorite functions these days is “COUNTIF” which can tell me how many have answered a question.

And, you can link between spreadsheets, and even workbooks. I have moved all my (admittedly simple) personal accounting (i.e. checkbook balancing and bill paying) to Excel (even if my wife mocks me…)

I’m no Excel expert; I just played with it and used Help to browse around. (Vlookup, which was essential to converting one two-table database to a spreadsheet, is still tough enough that I can’t get it right the first time, but…) And I have yet to set up spreadsheets that refer to other spreadsheets, as opposed to other pages within the same file…