Microsoft Office Forums - View Single Post - Giant table with numbers, complex text, images: Which program?

macropod · 11-23-2012, 02:25 PM

I'd suggest Word or Excel.

Either application can do all that's in your attachment, plus hold pictures, etc. In each case, your sort criteria would require columns of their own.

The main differences are that:
• In Excel, your table's width can span more than one page, whereas in Word it must all fit on one page. Although you could use a custom page size in Word to allow the extra width, you might not be able to print it at a useful scale. The alternative is to accept that some columns won't print.
• In Excel, when you insert a picture, it's size can't automatically be constrained to fit, say, the width of the column into which it is pasted, whereas in Word this is quite easily achieved.
• In Excel, you can't split rows as your attachment suggests has been done in one column, whereas in Word you can split rows and columns quite easily. In Excel, you'd need to insert the extra rows for the entire table width, then merge them in the columns that the extra rows aren't required. The same consideration applies to content that might span more than one column. Word can merge rows and columns too.
• Being designed specifically for tabular data, Excel's performance with sorting and the like will probably be much faster than Word's, but this probably won't be a big issue. If the expressions you're sorting on are longer than 63 characters, though, the Word sort will only be correct for the first 63 characters.
• Excel supports 4192 columns, compared to Word's 63. I doubt you'll be needing anywhere near even the 63 columns, though.

If you start working in Word or Excel, then decide you'd like to try the data in the other application, you can easily copy & paste the entire table from one to the other, so you don't have to make a 'final' commitment to either application. The only thing that might cause problems is the pictures, especially when transferring them from Excel to Word.