Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn’t know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer’s demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.
This is a real-life case of “meet the user where they are” despite the designer’s wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.
i…isn’t that the entire point of excel? what is it for if not to store data?
similarly i remember a reddit comment that broke my brain, saying no one should be using excel, they should be using a ‘cell matrix organizer’ or similar. we all can name 5 off the top of our heads
Storing data is only one of the parts to the formula of what makes a database. Proper databases require structured storage of the data and some way to query the data constructively. Excel did not have those features until Microsoft gave up trying to convince people to not use it as a DB and added it to Excel.
Excel has a purpose, but storing data long term isn’t it. It’s for calculating data. It shouldn’t be the single source of truth.
One of the things Microsoft did to make it work was extending the row limit from 65k to 1M. Apparently, Economics professors were very excited about that one, which explains a lot.
I only ever encountered Access was once many years ago and I was warned that it had issues with multiple users.
Well, to be fair to Access, it’s not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)
Well excel nowadays doesn’t have issues with concurrent users if you have office 365 like many companies do.
At that time it was Access with the files located at a company shared drive, the issue was concurrent writes I believe.
