This is not to pick on anyone in particular; it's a wide-spread issue. In a post (I won't mention which one so as to protect the innocent - besides it could any of a dozen posts that happen here in a week), the poster wants to add a "record" to a master file and have it automatically put the record in a subordinate tab. This isn't so bad. There's probably two or three posts a day asking for this.

However, in this post, when the person in the record changes departments, the poster wants to find the record in it's subordinate tab, remove it and put it in the new tab. Yes, this can be done with some VB code. It's totally automatic in a database.

Then there are folks who want to "share" a workbook and have multiple people work on it at the same time. You can do it, unless the workbook has macros. So either you put the workbook out there so only one person at a time can work on it, or you come up with some scheme where the workbook downloads a data file, the user works on it and then writes back to the file: last one to save to the data file wins and other changes are lost. Of course, you can write code to compare the differences and change only those rows that were changed. This code has already been written, it's called Access, SQL Server, etc.

I realize that this is a case of "If all you have is a hammer, then all your problems will look like nails."

I know part of this is economics. Excel comes as part of many packages such as the Student (Military) Edition whereas Outlook and Access are left out of these packages. So at a personal level, this could be an issue - although 5 licenses for the complete package under Office 365 for $99 a year is kind of hard to beat especially if you have multiple computers, tablets and other devices. I don't know if these licensing conditions and costs are the same outside the U. S.

Companies should be able to afford at lest ONE Access license. No additional licenses should be required. Excel's MS-Query can do most of the reporting and if you have to do data entry, a free, runtime only license will work for you (and probably even better since you can't change tables and queries and such with a runtime-only license; you do not have to protect the end user from themselves.)

So, I'm blaming it mostly on lack of experience. People know and understand Excel. Databases are new to them. Many companies don't have an understanding of them either. People are afraid of them. So they try to use a tool that is unfit for the job. The company only needs one person (plus backup) who understands databases. The rest can make do with front end databases for data entry and canned reports, or MS-Query for reports that require flexibility.

Excel has a lot of database-like features and is adding more with each release. However, it falls well short of being able to do complete database functions without a helping hand. It's ok for flat file, single-table, operations. However, as soon as you link to another table in a relationship diagram, troubles will begin.

So how do you tell a poster, tactfully, that they should be using a database?