Hi, my employer has asked me to produce a document store/database and it would be great to get some discussions around the suitability of different MS Office applications. All ideas most welcome!



Requirements

A method of storing numerous service profiles is required. My department provides services to other parts of the company and we have a new regulatory requirement to store certain information about these services, thus the service profiles (SPs). Please see a dummy SP below and then bullet-pointed requirement statements further below:

Service Profile Name
Shoe-shining

Service Name
Shining Shoes

Business Criticality
High

Key Business Contact
Mr Boss

Business Area
Executive & Board

Description
When a senior manager notices a speck of dust on one of his or her shoes, he/she calls us and we come running with our little kit to stop the speck from ruining their day.

This is what we do and we love it. This is an example of a requirement to have paragraph breaks



Requirement Statements

All the information on the SPs will be text based.

1. SPs will have a dozen or so fields.
2. Some of these fields will be selected from a drop-down list.
3. Other fields may run to a couple of paragraphs of text.
4. Certain individuals need to be able to make amendements, additions and deletions
5. We need to be able to query the data for information requests and for reporting.
6. The queries will use exact match criteria (drop-down list) and keyword searching (especially on the lengthy text fields).

Platform

I’m sure there are several products out there and various developers out there who would be able to give us all of this and more at a price. We cannot have a price for this. I am an MS Access Developer but there is resistence to having yet another unsupported MS Access solution developer out there. From my knowledge of the capabilities of MS Office, MS Access is the only application that will deliver all of this. If anyone can prove me wrong that would be great. Here follows an outline of the suitability of MS Office Apps for this solution:

MS Word 2003
Provides requirements 1,3,4
MS Excel 2003
Provides requirements 1,2,4,5,6
MS Access 2003
Provides requirements 1,2,3,4,5,6


So my questions to the world in essence are, is there any way that:

Word supports ... drop-down lists, searching/querying capabilities
Excel supports ... long text fields with paragraph breaks

A last word, simplicity is also important, Users should be able to work on all data inside one application only.

I believe Access is the only Office program which meets your requirement, other Office applications don't have database concept. PHP/MySQL is also a good solution.

MS access is good option for your purpose