Principle 5 of the ICAEW 20 Principles for Good Spreadsheet Practice states that you should: “Before starting, satisfy yourself that a spreadsheet is the appropriate tool for the job”. One of the most common transgressions of this principle is the use of a spreadsheet to input and manage data that would be better stored in a database application.
However, there seems to be a significant difference in how spreadsheets and databases are perceived. In general, spreadsheets are seen as a user application that pretty much anyone can have a go at, whereas databases tend to be seen as much more technically difficult and as very much preserve of IT experts rather than everyday users. As a result, users are often much more comfortable sticking with Excel rather than creating a database solution.
In the following two-part example, we will be considering the entry of some simple data and seeing how, …