No no, I'm on the same page as you. I thought you meant excel and access were almost identical on an architecture level, which they are not.
For basic stuff you are right in what you say, in my opinion.
As for having a workbook per page of your logbook, you would be surprised. Over the years here I have seen many people offer their excel logbooks in this format. Ive always thought it amore or less stupid implementation but some people will go to extensive lengths to make the electronic version match the paper version. To be clear, im not insinuating that you suggested this was a good way to go about things.
The thread starter mentioned that his data is on multiple worksheets so lets hope he isn't going about things in this way.
Ive been offering my free excel logbook for a while now. Ive got a bit of free time coming up so I might sit down and code out a solid access solution and offer it free also, sometime in the not too distant future. Be interesting to see what kind of added capability could be offered by going that route over excel.