26th April 2005, 10:26 PM
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Member
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Join Date: Jan 1970
Posts: 4,437
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Hi Zlotti,
Excel is not a database, it is a spreadsheet.
To have a database, you need to have seperate tables with relationships.
For everyday rating of races or reporting Excel is fine.
To store large amounts of data, Excel is limted, slow and clumbsy.
I'm talking about 40,000 records per sheet.
Access is a very good database with many programming features, but it is very intense and hard to learn if you don't want to dedicate months to learning it. It's taken me years to become an intermediate user of Access, and I've been helped along the way. I still don't know VBA code, but use snippets of code supplied to me from various generous souls.
I would say that it's really more difficult than it needs to be to set up queries that lookup large chunks of data with many criteria.
Also I'm extremely annoyed at the 2GB database limit still in Access 2003.
Another annoyance, is the fact that you need to regularly compact the database, which takes quite some time, as it grows in size just by use, rather than adding records. If you have a large database, it will crash if you don't compact it regularly if it's near 2GB.
Filemaker Pro is quite easy to learn and very easy to create queries.
Very user friendly, and very logical (not difficult to follow the logic of it).
Alpha 5 is another database which is quite easy to learn if you put the time in.
In summary and in my opinion only.....
I use Access and Filemaker.
I use Access to code auto importing of data (Filemaker can't do this).
Then I transfer the data in the tables to Filemaker and do all my queries and calculations in Filemaker.
This is the best option for me.
For a new person I would suggest inputting your data to Excel first, then importing that data into Filemaker and doing your searches from there.
More new user friendly.
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