Sadly databases are hard because data is hard. I've seen people trying to stuff one-to-many relationships in a single Excel tab duplicating the one side as many

Sadly databases are hard because data is hard. I've seen people trying to stuff one-to-many relationships in a single Excel tab duplicating the one side as many times as needed, e.g. Author_A Book_1 Author_A Book_2 Author_A Book_3 Author_B Book_4 Author_B Book_5 Another strategy I've seen is to stuff the many-side into a single cell, splitted with some less used symbol like |, ; or : . I'm curious to find what would they do when they meet a many-to-many relationship. Horrors surfaced when we analyzed the data: unintended duplications because ids and uniqueness checking was not a thing, shifted columns, undocumented column "formats"... In the end we parsed the whole mess into a DB. I don't see how you could implement a frontend for a database simpler than Access. It was as easy as Excel, with relationships. But reasoning a schema is harder than stuffing all things in a 2D table, and querying a multitable is harder than filtering a few columns.