Hi Dan

Access is very good at the following things:
1) dealing with relational data ie one person attends more than one training
course and each training course can have more than one person on it)
2) dealing with more than 650000 records
3) providing filtered "answers"
4) formatting of reports (to some degree)
however 1 & 3 depend on the database designer creating a good structure.

As for the "data entry" side of it - using Access is is basically like
creating all your data entry forms as userforms in VBA ...
so if the main reason for moving to Access was layout for data entry then i
probably would create userforms in VBA and use those .. if the main reason
was layout for reporting - Access isn't a bad option, but i would firstly
investigate mail merge with word type options as IMHO the learning curve for
these options is shorter than the learning curve for Access.

as for working with formulas - there's similarities and differences - ie IF
in excel is IIF in access ... a greater requirement for Access would be vba
skills as (again IMHO) you can't do very much in Access without using code
.... oh, and there's no macro recorder option ... you can create macros but
its not as easily in excel.

my 2c worth.

Cheers
JulieD

"Dan Wilson" wrote in message
...
Good day. I have been using Excel 2002 and other versions
of Excel prior to that for many years. I feel that I have
become rather proficient in the daily use of Excel.

Lately, my needs have been causing me some page formatting
problems. Specifically, the ability to have different
cell widths on the same worksheet. In order to accomplish
this, I have been merging cells where needed.

Is it time to move on to Access? Does Access allow a more
convenient "data form" setup? Will my programming
knowledge of formulas in Excel be usable in Access?

Thanks, Danno...