Is anyone using Microsoft Access to help them with the creation or maintenance of mapping files, such as project to application mappings or cost center to resource tower mappings?  I have been using Excel to handle the mapping files for the past two years.  I have previous experience with MS Access and I am beginning to think that it would be worth my while to leverage some of the capabilities of MS Access to handle the mapping files.  I would love to hear if anyone else is doing this.  

We are doing this pretty extensively, we actually use Access (for some) but SQL for most, SQL has column header limits that won't allow us to pull in some columns from certain tables and in those cases we use access via a powershell script to pull in data and modify/export into an external gateway to send to apptio.

We chose SQL because of the vast use-cases however Access is just as powerful, only more limited.

@Travis Cole Thanks for the reply.  I wish I was well-versed in SQL.  Did you always use SQL (and some Access), or did you have any files that started out being processed via Excel?

We use a mixture of multiple methods, everything started in excel some have graduated to SQL, some remain a macro in excel triggered by a system task, some is actually powershell working with excel/sql combined...it all depends on what we need to modify/do with the information and how its best to handle it. For massive manipulation, we use powershell/excel still.

We use a combination of Access and Excel.  I have quite a bit of scrubbing I need to do to our GL as well as matching vendors for labor and maintenance.  I have built reference tables in Access from previous GL entries to determine the vendor or the maintenance item and have roughly 1000 items to match per month.  By pulling in other reference files to help with the match we are now hitting in the 95% range each cycle which is a huge time savings.  

Thank you, @Vince McCune.  This is one of the use cases I had in mind as to why I would use Access--matching from reference tables.  I thought about using the TableMatch function in Apptio, but I think it would be cleaner to scrub my data with Excel or Access prior to uploading it into Apptio (in this particular instance).