Constance,
I have worked with Excel for two decades, and I can tell you that it
will easily handle 5000 records on a STABLE machine. But I don't think
the conversion is a good idea because of experiences I have had with
'systems' built on top of Excel Spreadsheets, Access DB, and MS Word.
These systems are built out of macros and Visual Basic to replicate the
features that are already included in a relational database system
(RDS). When an RDS detects a dependency in it's base, it has internal
tools to resolve and repair itself (these things happen when the power
surges or fails). The Microsoft suite is modular to the point of where
these repairs must be performed by a knowledgeable tech (YOU).
My biggest issues reside within my recent observations of Microsoft
products running on various versions of MS operating systems. It
appears to me that they may be (intentionally or unintentionally)
disabling functions in THEIR OWN products through the 'security
updates', forcing you to activate the 'upgrade mill' (This feature
requires the newer operating system, that opsys won't run you your old
hardware very well).
Case in point: I wanted to migrate from my old machine to Vista.
Vista came with Windows Mail... the Outlook Express will not install on
Vista. Fine with me, except that Windows Mail fights with Norton
Anti-Virus regularly corrupting my files and losing all my new email, so
I abandoned it for Thunderbird.
Case2: I still use Excel97 even though I have Excel 2003 and Excel
2007... it's fast, I paid for it, and it does exactly what I want it to
do. Today, I noticed that the 'Tools>Options' feature was causing the
program to abort under XP... all other features work perfectly. The MS
Error Reporting says "no longer supported... try upgrading to a newer
version." I do not see this type of behavior with my old Non-MS
products. This may hark back to the old days when MS was using
'unpublished opsys routines' to make their product faster than
competitors, for which they were eventually sued (still claiming they
did not).
Case3: Office 2007 - completely rewrote the user interface... lost
capability to send Mail Merge Email. It's there, but I didn't get a
PHD from Microsoft to figure out how to use it. I have spent about 120
hours studying it, but I think I need some additional courses in
Microsoft Enterprise Networking to make this simple feature work. In
the meantime, I went back to Office97 on XP. It works well. I have
heard from several experienced MSOFFICE users that could not figure out
how to print or save a document from Office 2007 without about 30
minutes of bumbling around. I have wasted many hours trying to kick out
a simple job because Microsoft moved a feature to another menu.
Microsoft's current direction reminds me of the IBM philosophy from
the early 80's... Sure we can do it... do you have the money?
- Brian
Constance Warner wrote:
Would an excel spreadsheet this size be stable or usable? Has anyone
else had experience with databases of this size?
And does anyone else have any talking points on why it's a bad idea to
replace a perfectly reliable, crash-proof database with an Excel
spreadsheet?
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