Tracking HRIS Data in Excel

In these tough economic times, I am seeing more and more information posted on the web about tracking HR Data in Excel. Is this a good idea?

The short answer is - NO. While Excel is great for manipulating and rearranging data, it is not good at handling complex relational data.

What's That? Complex Relational Data. As an example, One employee may have had a history of many positions within an organization. One employee may have many entries related to leave and attendance. One employee may have many entries related to benefits. The list goes on and on. Tracking this in Excel without duplicating data and increasing your chances for error is a nightmare.

If you are a small or medium business and large solutions such as PeopleSoft and SAP are not in your budget, you can look to more appropriate tools than Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Access is a relational database system capable of managing complex data and sharing within small workgroups. To see an HRIS created with Microsoft Access, see http://www.hrdatamanager.com/. Full Source Code is available allowing you to expand upon what is there and create what you want.

Good Luck with your HRIS searches and just remember to use the right tool for the right job.

Thanks,

Mark
mark@hrdatamanager.com

http://www.hrdatamanager.com/