Should I use Excel or Access, that is the Question
First question to ask yourself is - how do I know which product is the right one to use, Excel or Access?
The first question is ask - is your data relational or flat? This may seem difficult or complicated to answer, but let's see if we can make it easy. Flat data is a grocery list, or a list of your relatives and friends. A flat file is simple file that is not related to any other file, something that you could, in theory, write out on a piece of paper.
But let's say you have a customer list (list of each customer with his/her address, phone, email - in other words, a flat file) and a list of products (grocery items like canned goods, each with a price, weight in ounces and how many cans per carton, another flat file) and you have customers ordering cartons of cans. That more complex data set, which is a datafile of many customers placing more than one order of various canned goods is a relational datafile.
My rule of thumb is if you're color-coding Excel, then you probably need to use Access.