MS Excel provides many powerful tools to design, manage, and analyze custom business information. MS Excel provides an easy, inexpensive way to prototype new business applications. All too often, MS Excel spreadsheets that are useful to a business get used by more and more people, they grow in features and complexity, and get copied, modified and emailed around. Before you know it, the effort to maintain the MS Excel application starts to exceed the business benefits.

When you reach the point when your MS Excel application is out of control, it's time to think seriously about migrating your Excel database application to a relational database application. This will stablize the application, the "repeatability" of the business function, and improve the quality and consistency of the information.

Converting Excel database spreadsheets to a MS SQL Server database provides a far more structured, more repeatable approach for business critical processes and data than does an Excel spreadsheet. Excel spreadsheets provide infinite flexibility, but at the cost of bad data, and the cost of managing a distributed application that is intended for just one or a few users. An MS SQL Server database supports well-structured data, and repeatable, high quality data and workflow processes. The good news is that PCA can upgrade your Excel spreadsheets to MS Access or MS SQL Server, and make your Excel Application more structured, while preserving the original functional integrity of the original MS Excel spreadsheet.

Once an Excel application has been converted from an Excel spreadsheet to MS Access or MS SQL Server Database, the data can still be viewed and analyzed in Excel! But the data input, equations, and data manipulation become part of a structured, well defined database application, which provides for improved data entry consistency, improved versioning as new features get added, and generally easier, more straightforward user interfaces. Best of all, the data can be controlled in a secure way, and made available through secure role-based security over the Internet as a Smart-Client application!