Comparing Microsoft Excel and Database Management
From being designed primarily for personal productivity, Microsoft Excel is inherently a personal productivity database meant for individual and small team use, while enterprise database management applications and platforms are meant for much greater and wide-spread use across organizations. The intent of this paper is to profile the differences and similarities in their functions, and explain how each is ideally suited for a given set of tasks and the reasons why this is. The bottom line is that both are essential for operating a business of any size.Microsoft Excel Database Functionality and Uses Designed originally as a spreadsheet and low-end database that is flat-filed based in structure, Microsoft Excel has progressed from a relative simple calculation program to a more advanced database application through the use of Microsoft Visual Basic and other programming languages that have been integrated into the baseline application. The calculation capabilities have led many financial professionals specifically to use Microsoft Excel for the generating of macros that can interpolate and predict random variable definitions and values for example (Bancroft, Bourret, 2008). Microsoft Excel s use as a low-end
Enterprise database management systems are also increasingly being used for the development of business intelligence databases and data marts, where insightful analyses can be completed to track emerging trends in a company s distribution channels, customers and prospect audiences as well (Whiting, 2006). They are therefore much more strategic in scope versus personal productivity applications including Microsoft Excel. The bottom line is the Microsoft Excel is an excellent application for personal productivity and small workgroup database development, collaboration and publishing of quantitative results of analysis. Inevitably, enterprise database management systems also force change into organizations, and this includes at time radically re-aligning the processes and ways people do their jobs. Database Management Functionality and Uses The term enterprise is typically associated with database management systems in that these suites of software are deployment across larger organizations. As a result of these features Excel is the database and personal productivity application of choice for accountants on a global scale (Coy, 1999). It however cannot scale to the level of an enterprise database management application, which is described in the next section. Summary This paper has briefly defined the differences between Microsoft Excel and the data is relies on relative to enterprise database management suites. Both are critical for a business however. Taken together, all these areas are forming a new middleware or architectural layer in many IT organizations platforms (Bougettaya, Malik, Rezgui, Korff, 2006) which is leading to the development of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Called change management, organizations who install enterprise database management suites often encounter a high resistance to change as the processes people rely on to do their jobs need to change for the database management suite to be useful. The reliance however on more real-time data and the traceability of key events, customers, products, programs and processes throughout an organization have all also been catalysts of growth for database management systems. CRM fully uses all the functionality of enterprise database management systems in that they seek to define a 360 degree view of the customers, prospects and installed base of users for a given company (Zahay, 2008). For the individual contributors and small work teams, Microsoft Excel is essential, and for the larger organizations that rely on enterprise database management to support their line-of-business strategies including business intelligence, EPM and CRM, in addition to many others, enterprise database management is the better alternative.
Common topics in this essay:
Microsoft Excel,
CRM CRM,
Management EPM,
Management Functionality,
SOA Enterprise,
database management,
Visual Basic,
enterprise database,
enterprise database management,
microsoft excel,
Functionality Designed,
EPM CRM,
management systems,
,
Excel Summary,
database management systems,
personal productivity,
database management suites,
business intelligence,
management suites,
bottom line,
critical business,
database management applications,
larger organizations,
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