Re:The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook
by Closi on Sunday February 14, 2021 @04:17AM
(#26130816)
Access hasn’t matured because the “easy to make database and app” concept has moved to a focus on PowerApps / Sharepoint. It wasn’t/isn’t a strategic platform and isn’t designed for data analysis.
For the sort of stuff Access does you should do it within Excel, which now has the ability to build a fully relational dataset using PowerQuery and PowerPivot.
But yeah, excel can be slow! It’s not designed for big datasets without PQ but inevitably gets used for it because it’s easy and available. I can still do a lookup in excel quicker than I can write one in pandas even if it takes 5 mins. As a hint, the new XLookup strictly dominates Vlookup and depending on how the data is structured/sorted can be many times faster according to the search parameters.
For the sort of stuff Access does you should do it within Excel, which now has the ability to build a fully relational dataset using PowerQuery and PowerPivot.
But yeah, excel can be slow! It’s not designed for big datasets without PQ but inevitably gets used for it because it’s easy and available. I can still do a lookup in excel quicker than I can write one in pandas even if it takes 5 mins. As a hint, the new XLookup strictly dominates Vlookup and depending on how the data is structured/sorted can be many times faster according to the search parameters.