I am building a small application for a friend and they\'d like to be able to use Excel as the front end. (the UI will basically be userforms in Excel). They have a bunch of dat
It really depends on the application. For a normal project, I would recommend using only Access, but sometimes, the needs are specific and an Excel spreadsheet might be more appropriate.
For instance, in a project I had to develop for a former employer, the need was to give access to different persons on forms(pre-filled with some data, different for each person) and have them complete them, then re-import the data.
Since the form was using heavy number crunching, it made more sense to build it in Excel.
The Excel workbooks for the different persons were built from a template using VBA, then saved in a proper location, with the access rights on the folder.
All workbooks were attached as External tables to the workbooks, using named ranges. I could then query the workbooks from the Access Application. All administrative stuff was made from the db, but the end users only had access to their respective workbook.
Developping an Excel/Access application this way was a pleasant experience and the UI was more user-friendly than it would have been using Access.
I have to say that in this case, it would have taken a lot more time doing it in Access than it took using Excel. Also, the Application Object Model seems better though in Excel than in Access.
If you plan to use Excel as a front-end, do not forget to lock all the cells, but the editable ones and don't be affraid to use masked rows and columnns (to construct output tables for the access database, to perform intermediate calculations, etc).
You should also turn off autocalculation while importing data.