Access vs. Outlook for Contacts

[Paul]

Hi,
I'm new to this community and appreciate any help.
We recently installed Office 2007 in our church office.

I was going to use Outlook for our Contacts but one of our secretaries who
is familiar with Access but not so much with Outlook wants to use Access
instead.
I'm a little hesitant. It seems to me that Outlook was designed
specifically for Contacts, email and other info and such. I don't want to be
kicking myself later for a wrong decision upfront here.

Are there advantages and disadvantages or using one over the other?

 

[a a r o n _ k e m p f]

I would assume that multiple users would be a good place to start.

Access Databases support it - for trivial things like contact lists.
But more importantly; when you outgrow-- or you want to _EXTEND_ this
contacts capability-- then you'd be best off with Accesss

or SQL Server of course.

I just don't think that you could ever really set up Outlook to work
for a bunch of PCs unless you used something like exchange.
Right?

 

[(PeteCresswell)]

Per Paul:

ut one of our secretaries who
is familiar with Access but not so much with Outlook wants to use Access
instead.
I'm a little hesitant. It seems to me that Outlook was designed
specifically for Contacts, email and other info and such. I don't want to be
kicking myself later for a wrong decision upfront here.

Are there advantages and disadvantages or using one over the other?

I'd want to see a list of what needs tb done and then run the
list against Outlook to see where the gaps are.

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

You cannot share contacts, calendars, etc. from Outlook unless you are
running your own Exchange server for your own email. Outlook is perfect if
all you need to do is create calendar events and send email. If you ever
need to create any reports (like current membership, or attendance, etc)
you'll need a database.

You can access most of Outlooks functionality from Access with code, but you
don't need to learn much since there's plenty of free Access applications
that you can import into yours. I have some at:

http://www.datastrat.com/Download/OutlookForms2K.zip

and

http://www.datastrat.com/Download/OutlookAppointment.zip