3,000 Tables versus 3,000 Worksheets versus 3,000 Workbooks

I am unsure the correct nomenclature here: I will use the word "Table" to mean a rectangle region of data.
I have a project where I will need upwards to two to three thousand Tables.
Each Table will have only 4 columns & upwards to 50-100 rows.
Many Tables will contain less than 20 rows.
Right now it seems almost impossible for a table to reach 100 rows, but I'm unsure what the upper limit might be.
Thus each table will contain a small amount of data.
I will have a Worksheet which will summarize these tables of data.

I have been agonizing about what is the best way to structure this data.
Data entry will be via VBA.

Which would be better?

(a) One worksheet to contain 3,000 tables every 200 rows.

(b) One workbook to contain 3,000 worksheets (each table having its own worksheet).

(c) One folder to contain 3,000 workbooks (each table having its own workbook).

One advantage (to my mind, anyway) of 'c' is the fact that on most weeks, I will only need to update 100-200 of these tables. Which means I could open and close 100 to 200 workbooks and wouldn't need to open a workbook containing all the tables.

P.S.

(d) Since each table represents a student on a chess team, and there are about 200 or so schools, I could have 200 sheets (one for each school) and then a table for each student set apart by 200 rows.

(e) Perhaps I could have one workbook for each team, and one sheet for each table (student on the team).

What do you think?

Why not just one table for everything?

I personally would go with option 1 (one table). If organized well, it will be efficient and can be read/ updated easily. Opening and closing workbooks or looping through many, many worksheets is inefficient and will add to the total workload (e.g. time, disk space). Kyle is probably right about using a database, but I can't comment on this because I am still learning about database structure, normalization, etc.

Originally Posted by StevenM

And if I need the data for a particular student, I can sort the table by the ID and get the information easily enough. I could see that working.

Or use a pivot table so that you never have to 'sort' the original data. I have had nightmare situations where the data was sorted by some of the columns but not all and I had to manually double-check each row and make changes accordingly.

been there done that, abousetta...what a nightmare!! Pivot tables sound the way to do, plus, having only 1 file, backups and portability are much easier too

if you have the data all in one sheet and table you can then also use that as a data source easily from other workbooks (using pivots, querytables and/or ADO) if you don't want to, or can't, use a true database.