Excel VS Access

[chester1993]

Hey everyone!

I am looking to ask for everyone's opinion as to what's better to use.

Well, I am a video gamer. So, I am looking to track all the games me and my friends are playing and that sort. For instance, how many times I play a game, how many times my friend play a certain game. Everything about the stats during the game, like how many kills I got, how many Deaths.

Which one do you think is better? Excel or Access.

I have intermediate knowledge about Excel and little-to-none knowledge on Access. However, I am willing to learn the later if I need to. I just want your advice guys.

Thanks!

[NeedForExcel]

You cant have a "Vs" between Excel & Access..

Excel is sort of a front end reporting tool, and Access is a backend database (Of course front end is also possible)

But for your requirement (Since it sounds quite basic) I suggest go ahead with Excel and use it as a database..

[chester1993]

Hi @NeedForExcel. I figured I got the title wrong. Sorry for that, that's the 1st thing that comes to mind for some reason instead of "or". Hahaha, silly me!

I am not sure about "quite basic", I think I would need some advance knowledge to do the task. But, yeah, since I already have initial knowledge about Excel, that's what I chose. At least for now. What do you mean by "use it as a database"? You mean, dump the plan for Access and go with Excel. Or, Excel 1st then "transport" it to Access.

[NeedForExcel]

By "use it as a database" I mean, store your data in various Excel Tables, and then analyse it as required.

[Sam Capricci]

I use Access to store and report from a growing database. It is great for certain functions. You can group by, do counts and basic formulas, add fields to the data to allow you to do reports from it. You can link different tables to add value to what you are building. It handles crosstab queries nicely. It has some nice built in functions for formulas, you can do counts and just return the top 20 for example.
But Excel is far better if you need to do complex formulas, graphs and pivot tables (neither of which you can do with Access). You can set up data on one sheet and do reports from it on other sheets with dropdown lists and set up dashboards.
I use both, I couldn't do my job without both.
to decide what is important you'd have to decide how you want to compile data and if you want to report it out, how you want to report it.
For your description it sounds like Excel might be a better choice.