R vs. Excel and Access

In the Corporate Finance world, accountants and analyst often perform calculations over large data sets using Excel or Access.  

Typically a finance task will consist the below steps:

1. Pull data from an ERP system
2. Perform calculations and transformations on that data
3. Prepare a presentation quality report 

Generally speaking, Excel is great for step 3- preparing presentation quality reports. Access, on the other hand, performs poorly on all three steps. I recommend using R to pull data and perform calculations, and then use Excel to prepare the final report.

The below table compares the performance of each software on the steps of a typically finance task.

	Pulling Data	Performing Calculations	Preparing Final Reports
R	Fast. Highly scalable. Easy. See RODBC package.	Fast. Highly scalable. Easy. See SQLDF package.	Not implemented as far as I am aware.
Excel	Not scalable. Difficult to use.	Not scalable. Easy to use if approximately one to three tables.	Easy to use. Professional quality.
Access	Slow. Not scalable. Difficult to use.	Slow. Not scalable. Difficult to use.	Hard to use. Poor quality output.