this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Microsoft spent years and years trying to get people to not use Excel as a database, until they eventually had to give up hope that anyone who doesn't know the difference would voluntarily use Access, so they started adding database-like functionality to Excel to meet their customer's demands and try to make the experience at least a little bit less painful.
This is a real-life case of "meet the user where they are" despite the designer's wishes, because even within Microsoft, there is strong agreement on not using Excel as a DB.
I only ever encountered Access was once many years ago and I was warned that it had issues with multiple users.
Well, to be fair to Access, it's not like Excel is such a great multi-user database either, now is it? ;-)
Well excel nowadays doesn't have issues with concurrent users if you have office 365 like many companies do.
At that time it was Access with the files located at a company shared drive, the issue was concurrent writes I believe.
Better yet, put your access backend to OneDrive to acquire an un-openable, un-deletable file.
I actually ran this setup for a pretty long while without major issues. YMMV but OneDrive is not a terrible way to store a single user database backend if you don't have a lot of sequential writes going into it in a short timespan.
Yes, but at the time Excel didn't support concurrency either ;-)
Anyway, you are correct about the issue with concurrent writes, but that's only because Access was intended as a single user DB. If you wanted a multi-user DB you should be getting MS SQL server.
Not saying this product strategy worked (it clearly didn't, otherwise people would not be using Excel), but that's how they envisioned it to work.