Thread: Customer Database Excel Spreadsheet

Does anyone has a good sample/template for keeping customers information, such as name, address, product bought and used? I am thinking to have these information stored in Excel first and I don't want to start from scratch so I am thinking to use others as reference and build from there. Basically, the excel should be able to:

1. Have one worksheet for the data entry.
2. Store the data on another worksheet.
3. Have another worksheet that is able to select a customer and view all the necessary information.

This will not be a permanent solution. Sooner or later when the data grows, I will look for an appropriate software.

thanks,

Originally Posted by Kyle123

Ideally you should be using a database for this, it logically groups data and creates links between related data sets.

Excel is not a relational database (Access is), as an example to make this point, in excel it is difficult to capture data where more than one product is bought, or where you have more than one customer contact, or where you want to rename a particular product. How would you handle more than one user accessing the database? These scenarios are trivial in a database application, for access, have a look at the Northwind database example.

It is far easier to upscale a database application to a commercial database SQL server/Oracle etc than try to upscale from Excel, which would have a radically different layout and no built relationships.

That said if the data is extremely simple and stored in a tabulated list, Excel can do this well and it provides a common platform that users will be familiar with.

Yes, I did consider ACCESS as well but I thought the effort to do that would be more. At this moment, I only have like 30 customers to maintain so I am guessing with the small dataset, excel would be better.

I have no experience in ACCESS before but if you do have a similar program that I can use as a reference, then it would be great. Thanks.