You can develop your application with Excel as long as you plan for the column
expansions in the VBA code.
You can use the form feature in Excel to be able to enter data  into your
database.

I am a MS Access developer so I would tend to use Access rather than Excel.
That being said I have development some fairly complex Excel applications using
VBA and forms.

My thoughts are you can try the Excel ... develop your database  and using VBA to
do your analysis. If you can not get it to work  a lot of your efforts will not
be lost because they can be copied to Access and you move forward from there.