Is it feasible to use Excel as a multi-user database frontend via ODBC?

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1

I have a situation where a client wants to use Excel as the main interface for their database system. The database has some big tables with around 200,000 records that get updated pretty often. They want about 25 people to be able to use Excel at the same time to view and edit the data through an ODBC connection.

Personally I think a web-based solution would work much better, but the client really wants to stick with Excel. Do you think this approach could actually work? What problems should I expect?

I’m worried about several things:

  1. Data conflicts - what happens when multiple people try to change the same records simultaneously?
  2. Performance issues - won’t Excel try to load huge amounts of data every time someone opens the file?
  3. Access control - how can we make sure users only see the data they’re supposed to see?
  4. Tool limitations - Excel wasn’t really designed for this kind of database management

Has anyone dealt with something similar? Any advice would be helpful.

2

i totally see what u mean! excel can be tricky for this stuff. maybe ask them about their data types? big tables can slow things down. have they considered cloud options at all?

3

honestly, this sounds like a recipe for disaster lol. 25 people hitting excel through ODBC at once? you’re gonna have major locking issues and probably corrupt your data. excel wasn’t built for that kind of workload. maybe suggest starting with 2-3 users as a pilot to show them the problems before committing to all 25?