Time to switch from Excel to Access?

Sheets can be actually quite powerful as you can deploy the useful QUERY/FILTER features and recently I started to use MATCH and INDEX instead of horrible VLOOKUPS that people seemed to overuse in the organisation.
 
Id love to change a couple of our spreadsheets at work to access DB, the problem here is that I have spent the last 10 years teaching myself excel and have become quite proficient with it, I was trying to change a simple access query earlier today, I just couldn't, I don't even know where to start with access tbh :(
 
They have made excel act as much of a database as possible over the last few iterations of Office, whereas Access seems to have stagnated or dropped features i.e. pivot. That being said Access is easy to pick up and definitely has benefits of containing the data instead of a snowballing spreadsheet which can be a ticking bomb of a project ahead.
 
One nice thing about access is that none of your clients actually need the software installed, you can just have them use Access runtime and deploy front ends. This way they can't mess about with your data and you can constrain the way they interact with your form, and have far greater event driven control than you get in Excel. Knowing a bit of VBA is handy.
 
I forgot about that you are correct. You can also split the database so the tables are separated from the front end. Benefits are less traffic over the network, partial security and you can roll out front end periodically to end users without affecting your data.
 
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