The short answer
Excel is for working things out. Access is for keeping records straight. If one person maintains the file and the output is analysis, the answer is Excel — and no amount of complexity in the calculations changes that.
| Excel | Access | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Calculating and analysing | Storing and recording |
| Data shape | Flat tables — related tables via the Data Model | Related tables, natively |
| Worksheet limit | 1,048,576 rows × 16,384 columns | Not applicable |
| Real ceiling | Available memory | 2 GB per database file |
| People entering data at once | One, realistically | Up to 255 — fewer in practice |
| Controlled data-entry forms | No | Yes |
| Runs on Mac | Yes | No |
| Included in Office Professional Plus 2024 | Yes | Yes |
The question isn’t how much data you have
Almost every comparison of these two products opens with the same number: an Excel worksheet holds 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. Run out of rows, the argument goes, and it is time to move to a database.
That number describes the grid you can see. It does not describe what Excel can hold. A single table in Excel’s Data Model — the engine sitting behind the sheet, which we come to shortly — takes up to 1,999,999,997 rows. Nearly two billion. On 64-bit Excel, Microsoft describes the practical limit as available memory and system resources, not a row count.
Now the number on the other side. An Access database file is capped at 2 GB, minus the space needed for system objects. That is a hard ceiling, and it arrives sooner than people expect once records start carrying attachments.
On raw capacity, Access is the smaller container. The idea that you graduate from Excel to Access because you have too much data has it backwards. That is not an argument against Access — it is an argument that capacity is the wrong thing to be measuring.
So what is the right thing to measure? Two questions, and they are both about people rather than data. How many people need to be putting information in at the same time, and does the record have to survive the person who created it? Everything useful in this comparison follows from those two.
The four steps between a spreadsheet and a database
The move from a spreadsheet to a database is not a single decision. It is four, and most people only ever hear about the first and third.
One sheet, one person
A price list. A contact list. A month of expenses. One table, one person maintaining it, and the point of the file is the sums at the bottom. Microsoft’s own guidance is blunt about this: “Excel is optimized for data analysis and calculation.” Nothing about a file being large, or the formulas being intricate, means you have outgrown this step. Plenty of serious financial modelling lives here permanently and should.
Several sheets that need to agree with each other
This is where most people get told they need Access, and where most of them are wrong. You have a customers sheet, an orders sheet and a products sheet. They refer to each other. Keeping them in step means VLOOKUPs across tabs, and one careless sort breaks the lot.
Excel has solved this since 2016, and almost nobody knows. Two features do the work. Power Query — the Get & Transform Data group on the Data tab — pulls data in from other files, databases and exports, then reshapes it: drop a column, fix a data type, merge two tables. It is in Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024 and Microsoft 365, which is to say every version anyone is realistically running.
Then the Data Model, which is Microsoft’s own description of what happens next: “a new approach for integrating data from multiple tables, effectively building a relational data source inside the Excel workbook.” You define proper one-to-many relationships between your tables, then build PivotTables that draw from all of them at once. No lookup formulas, nothing to break when someone sorts a column.
If your problem is “my sheets won’t talk to each other”, this step is the answer, it costs nothing extra, and it is already on your Data tab. The honest limits: a workbook holds only one Data Model, and it is still fundamentally a one-person tool. Which is exactly what step three fixes.
More than one person typing
This is where Access earns its place, and the trigger is people, not volume. Microsoft’s framing again: “Access is the best choice when you need to track and record data regularly, and then display, export, or print subsets of that data.”
Three things it gives you that a workbook cannot. Forms, so a colleague adds a customer by filling in labelled boxes rather than typing into row 4,112 and hoping. Enforced relationships, so an order cannot exist against a customer who was deleted last March. Validation on the field itself, so a date is a date and a postcode is not silently reformatted into something else. The common thread is that they all prevent something. That is the job: keeping records intact when the person entering them is not the person who designed the file.
Access has its own ceiling — that 2 GB file limit, and 255 nominal concurrent users which in practice is a good deal fewer over a shared network drive. We have covered where those limits bite and what Microsoft says about Access’s future separately.
When Access itself runs out
You do not throw it away. The standard answer is to move the tables to SQL Server or Azure SQL and keep Access as the front end — the forms and reports your staff already know, with real database scale underneath. It is a migration rather than a replacement, and it is covered in the article above.
Office Professional Plus 2024 is the only Office suite that includes Access as well as Excel. Start in a spreadsheet, move the data across if and when a second person needs to type into it — without a second purchase.
What each one is bad at
Both of these are widely oversold, usually by people with a preference. The weaknesses are worth knowing before you commit a year of records to either.
Where Excel lets you down
There is no controlled way in. Anyone with the file can type anything into any cell, including over a formula, and nothing stops them. The Data Model’s relationships are built for analysis and reporting, not for running a business’s day-to-day record-keeping — you are relating tables to summarise them, not to police what gets entered. And the moment a second person is involved you inherit the versions problem: two copies, both edited, no way to reconcile them that does not involve someone’s afternoon.
Where Access lets you down
It is Windows only. There is no Mac version — Microsoft states plainly on its own store listing that the Access application is not available for Mac — and no browser version since Access Web Apps were retired. If you work on a Mac, the ladder above stops at step two, and it is better to know that now than at checkout. Our note on what Office 2024 does and doesn’t cover on Mac has the detail.
It is also easy to build badly, and a poorly designed Access database is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced. There is no real-time co-authoring. And it is, as we said, the smaller container at 2 GB.
If several people need to be in the same records at the same time, from different offices or from home, you are describing a hosted database rather than a desktop one. Access on a shared drive over a VPN is a well-known way to corrupt a file. That is a different purchase from anything on this page, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing.
What it costs to have both
Here is the part that makes the decision easier than it looks. Buying these separately from Microsoft is expensive. Microsoft’s UK store sells Excel on its own for £159.99 and Access on its own for £159.99, both one-time purchases for one PC. That is £319.98 to own the pair Microsoft’s way. Office Home & Business 2024, at Microsoft’s list price of £249.99, gets you Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote — and no Access at all.
Office Professional Plus 2024 includes Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote in a single one-time purchase, supported by Microsoft until October 2029. Which means the sensible way to approach this article’s question is not to answer it yet. Work in Excel. Use Power Query and the Data Model when your sheets start disagreeing. If the day comes when a colleague needs to enter records through a form, Access is already installed and your data moves across — no second decision, no second purchase.
If you have read this far and settled firmly on step one or two — you want a spreadsheet, you are never going to need a database, and you do not want Word or Outlook either — then Excel on its own is the cheaper route, at — for a single PC. It is the right purchase for a genuinely settled decision, and the wrong one if there is any chance you will want the rest later.
Frequently asked questions
Not in the strict sense, but the line is blurrier than it used to be. A worksheet is a flat table, not a database. However, Excel’s Data Model can hold multiple tables with real relationships between them — Microsoft describes it as building a relational data source inside the workbook — which covers a great deal of what people want a database for.
Yes. Using Power Query to import and the Data Model to define one-to-many relationships between tables, Excel handles related data properly for analysis and reporting. What it cannot do is control how that data gets entered, which is the point at which Access becomes the better tool.
When more than one person needs to enter data, when that data has to stay valid without someone checking it, or when the records need to outlast whoever built the file. Volume is rarely the deciding factor. If one person maintains it and the output is analysis, stay in Excel.
A worksheet holds 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That is the visible grid. A table loaded into Excel’s Data Model holds up to 1,999,999,997 rows, so on 64-bit Excel the practical limit is your machine’s memory rather than a row count.
2 GB per database file, minus space for system objects. Access also allows 255 fields per table and a nominal 255 concurrent users. If you reach the size limit, the usual answer is to move the tables to SQL Server and keep Access as the front end.
No. Access is a Windows-only application, and there is no browser version. Mac users who need a desktop database will need either a Windows machine, a virtual machine, or a different product entirely. Excel runs on Mac normally.
Yes. Office Professional Plus 2024 includes Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and OneNote. It is the only Office 2024 suite with Access — Home & Business 2024 does not include it.
Yes, and Microsoft recommends it. In Microsoft’s words: “If you use Access to store your data and Excel to analyze it, you can gain the benefits of both programs.” Access holds the records; Excel pulls from them for the modelling, charts and what-if work it is better at.
Access vs Excel: the short version
Stop measuring your data and start counting the people. One person analysing figures needs Excel, however large the file gets. Several sheets that need to agree need Power Query and the Data Model, which you already own. Several people entering records need Access. And because Office Professional Plus 2024 has both applications in one one-time purchase, you can make that call when the situation arrives rather than guessing at it now.
Gary Walsh is the Head of Tech Support at Software Supplies, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. Fully Microsoft-certified and experienced across the full business software stack — from Windows and Office to cloud infrastructure and device management — Gary delivers practical, no-nonsense advice that helps users and businesses get the most from their technology.
