Using Access and Excel

How do you find using Access and Excel for working with this kind of data? What is the difference for you between wading through a cemetery in a database, versus wandering through it in real life?

   As a visual person, I find using Access and Excel for working with this kind of data to be detrimental to the study of the graves.  We must consider what we are working with here.  There is more to these graves than sets of data and information for us to mine. These are real sites of remembrance for people who did once live, and turning their memories into a spreadsheet to me feels a slight bit sacrilegious.  I do recognize that  this is often the only viable option when we cannot visit the cemetery ourselves, and for the purposes of learning how to manipulate data relating to the archaeology of death we need this sort of information.  In the only way I can describe, it still does not feel right...
   I think it is undeniable that there are certain feelings that one feels when entering a cemetery or burial site. There is also a certain amount of respect afforded to the monuments, the atmosphere, and the memories enclosed in the land.  I feel that if I were to walk around the St Stephen’s Cemetery, and personally deal with the monuments and burial sites, I would have a better understanding of the people that were buried there.  So much information is not included in the database that could shed light on their lives.  Condition of the graves, the landscaping around them, their location within the burial ground.  All could prove interesting and relevant to further research on the cemetery and some of this is impossible, or too convoluted, to include in a database.