Excel or Access?

[Jay Baker]

Hi All,

I am creating a running inventory workbook which includes all of our products currently in stock. I take our current stock plus todays receivables minus today's usage for an adjusted daily total. I then take the new total and manually copy/paste for tomorrow.

Would you guys suggest that I take those numbers and throw them into ACCESS (barelyused) or SQL (neverused) or another database program... or make a macro to automatically get those numbers and keep using excel (problematic because of daily changing filenames) or keep doing what I'm doing the way I'm doing it??

Does that make sense?
Thanks,
Jay

ps: I know that "Microsoft Access is a database application, Excel is a reporting and analysis application." (excel-vba.com) But for this purpose, wouldnt it be easier (and simpler) to stick with one application?

 

[SydneyGeek]

Hi Jay,

It could be a sort of "how long is a piece of string" question. If you are doing the same thing over and over again, and not having to correlate more than 2 categories of data, Excel will do the job just fine -- and a macro would be the way to go. If you need to correlate, slice/dice any further, Access is looking good. Once the data is in Access, you can still do the number-crunching in Excel -- plenty of options, depnding on your needs.

Denis