>I am impressed by the variety of functions in Excel myself. There must be around 500. Just as an example, it has an entire category of functions to work with complex numbers. I used this for my engineering study (for calculations in electrical circuits).

Indeed, I noticed those, quite a large number of them.

>A host of database and information functions can help you work with data as a "database", although I would still recommend VFP for heavy-duty work...

Yes, though I'm very impressed by the Excel functions, it's still sort of "extra-messy" to work with, due to all the row/column parameters Excel requires for many function inputs. Certainly DBs are much "tidier" to work with, in general. And you also have your size-limit in Excel, of course. I'm not planning on uninstalling vfp and writing my apps in Excel just yet :-)

Still, I'm a happy camper now. I was beginning to think my project was going to be "defeated" after the Access disappointment. Who would've thought Excel could do much stronger sorts than Access? (not me, anyway)

So, Access stinks as a DB, after spending some time with it, IMO. However, what I've found MS Access very good for is setting up ODBC connections to access server-DBs for end-users. Maybe that's why they called it "Access" I guess...