but without having to design and manage a relational database. it's a 2D grid, that lets you have a basic set of parameters for each part, EXACTLY THE SAME as a relational database allows. I don't understand the issue complaining about excel being not a real database. Especially considering you don't have to do it that often. then you have to close/reopen, which is frustrating, but easy to do, and pretty fast. so maybe worth buying) Biggest issue with using an xls library isif you want to use it in AD and edit it in excel at the same time, you sometimes get file lock complaints. (but full excel also lets you have BOM templates in AD.
you can use libre office as long as you make sure to always save in xls format. Actually it's very simple to manage, and nice to just have a file you can open up and investigate. I've used excel database to build a parts library a few times now. Can you please tell me how to use Excel as library database? The official documentation doesn't help at all. Every search result says that it can be done with either Access or Excel, but none of them explains how to do it with Excel. I searched Google results for an hour, but couldn't find how to use an Excel file as library database. Altium didn't accept it and give the error message "Connection Failed. I prepared the simple Excel file in the attachment which is nothing but an empty file with only some headers on its first row. The problem is, I don't know what Excel file format Altium expects to see. As far as I understood, Altium doesn't create the Excel file itself, but requires the user to initialize the database with an existing Excel one. However, I don't have an Access license, so I want to do the same thing with an Excel based one. The nicely explains how to do it with Access based database. I watched this and read this official documentation article. Recently, I decided to start using a database system for some advantages it brings.
I had been using discreet schematic and footprint libraries for every component.