My effort at a less technical response…
Spreadsheets are only suitable for short-term, single-purpose data. They’re useful for helping one person to make some calculations, produce a chart for a presentation or report, etc.
If any of the following statements are true, it is time to use a database:
- The data is used by more than one person.
- The data will be used and updated for more than a few days.
- You are using a macro for any reason.
- The data does not make sense in a single table, or you have multiple sheets which contain related data. You should not keep having to switch between sheets to ‘look up’ data.
- The data is important and cannot be recreated with less than one hour of effort.