Not meaning to stir the pot....BUT...

Excel is to a database what a pen knife is to an axe.
You could whittle a sapling to the ground with the knife,
but you'd never call the it an axe.

In that same vein, Excel can utilize look-up tables. But a look-up table
is effectively a one table database. There ARE ways to abuse Excel into
behaving like a simple database, but it will still be sadly lacking in
the features one expects from a database: referential integrity,
cascading deletes, primary keys, etc. Also, if a formula driven
approach is used, the workbook becomes sluggish, fragile and volatile.
The reason is that formulas are always active...consuming resources with
every change in the workbook. They are also easily corrupted by the
deletion of the referenced cells. Databases effectively store "dead"
data which is only updated via queries in single pass sweeps through
the data. They are very durable against deletion/additions of rows.

Some might argue that you can implement a VBA or MS Query solution to
use Excel as a "real" database, but what's really happening is a database
engine is applied to Excel lists to treat them as tables. But, even that
approach will quickly encounter obstacles.

Basically, a database is not a spreadsheet application and a spreadsheet
is not a database. But there is a very narrow gray area where one can
behave
like a simple version of the other.

--------------------------

Regards,

Ron
Microsoft MVP (Excel)
(XL2003, Win XP)



"Bill Ridgeway" wrote in message
...
Tyro wrote <<Excel is not a database nor does Excel maintain databases.
I would beg to differ.

A database is, essentially, an ordered, structured collection of
information. The media on which it is kept may be a card index, pages in
a loose-leaf binder or a computer. The method by which it is kept on a
computer could be Access (a database manager) or Excel (which,
technically, is not a database manager). Using Excel does require a
degree of manual intervention (dependent on the complexity) to manage it
but learning and using Access for a small database may not be required.
It's really down to 'horses for courses'..

Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions