Alexander D. Mitchell IV wrote: I'm hardly a fan of Excel, or its database equivalent, MS Access.
But one thing that happens to be in its favor is that it's very unlikely to go out of business/fashion and cease being supported, unlike a group of other cataloging programs I watched one museum churn through. (Who remembers BookCat?)
With any such program, you have to be aware of the possibility that a) your software will end up being discontinued and no longer supported; and b) at some point you will lose the ability to work with the base program through some OS upgrade. You don't want to be the equivalent of that guy who still has a computer with a floppy drive because he "needs" it for his favorite program. Most competently-written database or cataloging programs will allow some function of exporting your data into another format such as Excel or CSV (comma-shared values) form. If not, run away like a scalded cat--you will be held hostage to a proprietary format.
And make sure in the case of Access you have the original database with all the code and macros, and not just the compiled version.
I originally wrote my Surviving World Steam program in Visual Basic 2.0 and Access 2.0 in the mid-1990s; running on Windows 3.1 and Windows NT.
It worked perfectly fine on Microsoft Windows and even Windows emulators up until Windows 7; when Microsoft no longer included the Win16 emulator. Fortunately I was able to get a copy of Visual Basic 6.0, and was able to upgrade the back end to Access 10; the last version VB 6.0 supported.
It took some work, but now it works in Windows 7 and beyond for some time; 20 years after I first wrote it.
On the other hand the tools I used to use to develop content for Microsoft Flight Simulator are nearly all broken and no longer work.
So Access and Excel may not get much respect; but you are right; content written for Microsoft Office can last for decades.
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