In your question you allude to the best answer. Use Access. With forms and
reports you can provide the user with exactly what they want. Excel is best
suited to analyzing numeric data, which is not what you are trying to do. It
can be done in Excel but it is a whole pile of work to come up with a
solution that will never be as good as what you could do in Access. Just my
two cents...
--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson


"Alex" wrote:

I have a very simple spreadsheet with basically text and date data (no
numbers) for action planning.

Name Action Item ... Date Quarter Notes

Users can use autofilter and sorting to see the data. But, because for some
cells it can be a text data with many words and the cells are not formatted
to show the whole text it would be better to use some reporting functionality
with may be a form. On that form the user could choose the data from
comboboxes he/she wants to see (be sorted) and some reports similar to
Access could be shown.

Could anybody advise the way I could do it?

Thanks