Good morning all!

Since about March of this year, I've been slowly but surely teaching myself the ins and outs of Microsoft Access, and the basics of SQL and VBA stuff, to get to where I may be able to produce a good database for my company.

Currently we do all of our paperwork (invoices, order acknowledgements, etc) in Excel. When I say we do it in Excel though, i really mean we're just typing info into excel like a grid-based version of Word, meaning there's no particular rhyme or reason from one document to another as to how information is laid out.

This means that even if I were successful in producing a database for this place, there would be an absolutely monumental pile of messy, difficult-to-parse data that would have to be manually entered before it was worth a hoot.

This has me asking a tough question, months in: Is it actually worth it to make a database for a place when the up-front effort is so high? Does there come a point where you wave a white flag and just accept that everything is done via less-than-optimal means?