SQL Administrator Question:

Scale. If you were to take a (singular) spreadsheet and a (singular) table and place them side by side, there would be effectively no difference in the data you are seeing or what you could do with it. As you go bigger and bigger with more and more tables and spreadsheets, if you have a black belt in spreadsheet-fu you can accomplish many of the same tasks that a database could do as well. The problem is, as you go larger and larger and larger, that it becomes much more difficult to be human-friendly and still be efficient when it comes to processing data. So should you replace every single spreadsheet with a database? Not necessarily, but if the data on that spreadsheet needs to be accessed quickly by multiple users simultaneously and is growing rapidly, it may be time to consider going to the dark side (they have cookies).