Limitations of Using Excel as a database

Excel is a spreadsheet application but contains a number of features that allow you to use it as a simple database. Microsoft Excel solves many database problems you may encounter in your work. It doesn’t solve everything. Neither does any other software. Many databases start as a list in a word-processing program or spreadsheet. As the list grows bigger, redundancies and inconsistencies may begin to appear in the data. The data becomes hard to understand in list form, and there are limited ways of searching or pulling subsets of data out for review. Once these problems start to appear, it may be a good idea to transfer the data to a database created by a database management system (DBMS), such as Microsoft Office Access. Eventually Microsoft Access will show its own limitations. At that point one could consider more robust and expensive and less user-friendly solutions including Microsoft SQL Server or even Oracle. For most business applications you will find that you can effectively manage your data as a list in Excel and save the time and money on the more robust solution for another project.

There are limitations to using Excel as a database.

1. Only one person at a time can enter data into the database.
2. Limited quantity of data. Each sheet in an Excel workbook is limited to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. That may sound like a lot but a database such as SQL Server faces no such limit.
3. Database management system software, such as Microsoft Access, contain features that prevent data inconsistencies. Excel does not feature these constraints.

These limits are not a factor for most small applications where a single person is responsible for the database. Very valuable data at the department level are not stored in the centralized mega database because they have no " corporate" significance but a departmental personal database can be created and the data used for very critical decisions.

Nonetheless, Excel does contain a number of features which enable you to work efficiently with large sets of data. Once you outgrow Excel you can transfer the data to a database created by a database management system (DBMS) such as Microsoft Access or SQL Server.