I have a customer trying to use a 75mb Excel spreadsheet as a database. They are resistant to move it to anything else. I am not aware of a way to index an Excel spreadsheet, so I thought I would ask. I did Google “index Excel”, but I did not find anything. There seems to be an “index” function in Excel that is unrelated to database indexing (unless I’m reading it wrong).
EDIT (Additional Info): A Crystal Report has been written against this spreadsheet and it has 40, yes 40, sub-reports, all going against the same multi-tabbed spreadsheet. It’s crazy, but that’s how they designed it. It’s taking an absurd amount of time to process and if the data were indexed, it would still be slow, but it would 100x’s less slow.
You cannot index an Excel spreadsheet. The =INDEX() function in Excel is merely a way to get a cell reference and has nothing to do with the “index” that is a defining feature of any RDBMS. There are reasons that database management systems are expensive and complex, and one of them is because they provide the ability to organize data for fast retrieval and processing.
However, your real problem seems more political than technical! I don’t know what kind of time and resources you have available to you, but I would see if you could import this spreadsheet into some kind of free/cheap database(like SQL Server Express, or even Access), and slap together a mock report to demo to the client. From what you describe, it seems like they really have no idea about the kind of performance they COULD be seeing vs. what they have to deal with now. If they see a often-used report being generated 50x faster than what they usually see, they might change their minds about Excel.