Access or Excel which is preferable when designing a SP site

Question

I may have some difficulty explaining this. We are creating a SharePoint site to house an inventory. We will need read access to everyone and edit privs for a few. Currently, I have the data in an Excel file in a quasi relational setup. (I share a primary key across tabs). I am trying to determine the best approach based on:

1. End users are competent in Excel, but unfamiliar with Access and need to perform updates before a front end is built.
2. We are using Office 2010 but upgrading to Office 2016. Access isn't a part of the suite. I do not know about the SharePoint 2010 being upgraded to Office 365 or whatever. Nor do I know whether infopath will continue to be supported.
3. They want to use Infopath forms as the method of updating records.
4. Users are worldwide with firewalls and VLANS. I am not sure if this is relevant to the initial design.
5. I suppose I want to design this in SP2010 knowing eventually Sharepoint will be upgraded and don't want to reverse engineer it if possible.
6. There aren't a lot of records up upwards of 300 fields. (I can split them into relational tables, but with Sharepoint lists, I don't know about different sources.
7. Part of me says Excel would be more user-friendly, but Access more efficient although Microsoft seems to be moving away from Access

Answer 1

Access is more powerful by a long way but I've found it's confusing to new users, so if you intend on them capturing data through access without a front end I think you may struggle.

I would probably recommend getting people to capture into Excel and then automatically pull that data into the access database (either using the linked data import function or with a macro or similar... there are many ways to skin that cat)

Then just sync the access data with sharepoint lists. That way you'll have the data available in every format/ platform, which will offer you a lot of flexibility later on when migrating.

It's a long-way around for getting an excel sheet and a list to sync, but it's a heck of a lot easier for users to use IMO.