Database vs. Spreadsheet Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Database vs. Spreadsheet - Essay Example In section two of this paper, overview of database and spreadsheet is given. Section three of this paper discusses various types of similarity that both MS Access and MS Excel have. In section four of the paper, the technical analysis of the software’s will be presented. And at last in section five, which software MS Access and MS Excel can be used in which situation will be discussed. A spreadsheet is a rectangular table of information. It means for the format used to present bookkeeping ledgers. The most common use of spreadsheets is to manage basic information such as telephone numbers, employee names, financial data, calculations, addresses and many more other things. Spreadsheets can store data but in actual it is not performs that job as easily as a database can perform. In actual, a spreadsheet is not considered as a database. It some thing like a robust, multifaceted calculator and data analyzer that incidentally can perform some database functions. As spreadsheets are intended to handle numerical data, they will also handle text, but they are not suited to handling complex queries and intradata relationships, so they are not used in data handling systems. Various types of spreadsheet programs that are used are KSpread, OpenOffice.org Calc or Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheet software programs are not database management systems. They stores data in rows and columns called worksheets and areas within the worksheet, where the rows and columns intersect are called cells. Database in general is a collection of data arranged for ease and speed of search and retrieval. Database is also called as databank. In technical perspective database can be defined as a set of related files that is created and managed by a database management system (DBMS). Now these days, database management system can manage any form of data. The forma of data may include text, images, sound and video. Today some of the common database management systems