Jim,
I have Office 2000 on my PC, and a check in Excel shows that it has a limit of 65,536 rows. Access, which I have used for close to 15 years (I may still have the discs for Access 1.1 here somewhere) can go over one million (1,000,000). I much prefer Access to Excel for these databases, since the relational aspects will allow much more consistent construction.
I am not sure about the limits on Excel 2003, it may be the same. Excel 2007 may have increased the number of rows.
Further checking on line turned up the following website:
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/...26/474258.aspx
For Excel 2007 (Excel 12) the number of columns was increased from 256 (2^8) to 16K (2^14). The number of rows was increased from 64k (2^16) to 1m (2^20). I would hope that the number of columns in Access was increased also, otherwise you can't import these new Excel files. Well, another check shows that Access has stayed at 256 columns. I really wonder how much support Access has within Microsoft.
Frank.