Excel vs Access

[MarillionFan]

I would go down the Cobol route. There are a plethora of over 70's on CUK who would be able to give you a hand.

[lightng]

Another vote for Access here.

[d000hg]

Access definitely, more scalable and better designed for multiple use/ edit - Jet 4.0 it much better than Excel. Also 600 students doesn't necessarily mean 600 rows! Could include courses or other details which would require one to many. In that case it would scale very rapidly. Ive seen so many people use Excel as a database and unless you are very savvy and can link in forms and events it very rarely (if ever) works. One of the reasons is its not efficient to manage many columns of data, you need it in a GUI somehow.
2 hour tutorial on simple database design and you can put together some very basic Access database.

That's the point though... do they just want a single sheet listing all students and a few details, or one sheet per course, etc, etc. For non-techies, a single-sheet spreadsheet, even if they have to scroll a lot, is the approach they like best. e.g a column for name, and a column for "enrolled in course X". It's horrible from a software point of view, but to get to a system they will understand as well, you need to a few steps towards a proper app... a simple Access front-end may easily baffle them unless you put the time in to hiding the DB properly.

[Durbs]

Having been asked to help out with a school spreadseet in the past where various members of staff had used their own incomprehensible colour coding system (and people WILL use colour coding systems if given Excel) and pupil names were spelt differently between sheets i'd go for Access for the extra constraints you can apply to the data.

There must be loads of freebie templates for what you want, like: Student database - Templates - Microsoft Office

[Boudica]

Thanks everyone, sorry for being so slow to come back I've been doing the intentionality essay from hell

I'm really grateful for your thoughts, especially mf, where would cuk be without the class clown


I think the idea of really seeing what data we collect is probably a good idea. I did a first year access course at uni about a million years ago but I'm sure I would not build a very good db!!!