Each employee records their weekly work data in an
Excel workbook. These workbooks contain hidden
VBA code and uses Forms and buttons, etc.
(BTW, each workbook is a minimum of 260K+ in size.)

If I need to check past data, I simply navigate through
the file and folder system and find the correct .xlsm
workbook file(s) and peek at the data that I'm interested in.

The above method seems ineffecient to me. Does anyone
think it would be better to use an Access database for this?

I thought about creating easy-to-use input forms in Access,
then our employees can store everything in a single database
file. Someone told me that the Access database file would
be too big for this. I'm not sure if that's true, especially
if I create new database files for each new year, for
example db2013.accdb, db2014.accdb, etc. etc...

Does anyone have an opinion about this? Do you think
the Access approach would have smaller yearly data files?
Is one approach more efficient than the other?

Id' appreciate any thoughts here. Thank you.