I've spent the past week building a system that parses spreadsheets into xml and feeds them into a relational db. Having relational integrity gives insight int

I've spent the past week building a system that parses spreadsheets into xml and feeds them into a relational db. Having relational integrity gives insight into relationships in data in ways not possible with a vlookup. Databases also provide concurrency so that many analysts can work in the same data. But because of VBA, you can bind an Excel spreadsheet to a database and get the best of both worlds.