Excel used to be the poor schmuck’s database, with spreadsheets that just sort of sat there. You could create something more sophisticated with LOOKUP functions, but they were a huge hassle to set up.

When databases became available for the personal computer in the mid-1980s, they quickly gained a mystique as the ultimate productivity applications. Despite their widespread use, in some ways they ...

Originally, Excel was not designed to be a real database. Its early database functions were limited in quantity and in quality. And because every record in an Excel database is visible on the screen ...