Jack is definitely right that Excel is not the ideal program for
cataloging piano rolls.  The advantages of a relational database
are many.  However it is quite a lot more learning but there are
books such as Access for Dummies or Learn Microsoft Access in 3 Days
or whatever it is.  These "Dummies" books can be very useful if you
want to quickly learn just what you need to know and  do not need to
become a sophisticated user.

Access and most other database programs will allow you to export data
to standard formats.  Access and programs to deal with its format will
be around for a long time but it is good to have the option of
switching to something better when it comes along.

For most of my record keeping, I use Excel because it is easy to
export the data as tabbed text and then to process it with Perl
scripts.  Accessing the data in a relational database is much more
complex and Access, specifically, is more complicated than other
databases.  SQL is a much better choice but also more difficult to
learn quickly.

When I first started (mis)using Excel as a database I occasionally
messed up the whole sheet by sorting just a portion of it.  Then
I discovered a way to avoid this and have never made this sort of
mistake since then.  If you highlight a single cell in a column and
click the sort button, the entire sheet is sorted following the sort
order of the column the cell is in.  You don't have to worry that you
may have missed a line somewhere.

Excel can be very useful for quickly setting up a "database".  Copying
and pasting and the use of global replace can do a lot to avoid typing.
Sorting and replacing can fix a lot of errors.  What can not be fixed
easily, I deal with in scripts but that is a whole lot to learn.  Once
you have a "database" in excel, you can always export it to tabbed text
and then import it into Access when you are ready to do it the right way.

For those who play MIDI (or other multimedia files) you can enter
hyperlinks to the multimedia files directly in Excel.  You can then
play the files by clicking the link.  It is much easier to do this in
Excel.  Also, I have written a program that creates an Excel sheet with
hyperlinks to all MIDI files in a folder.  These can be made for your
entire collection and will also survive importing into Access.

The procedure is a little complex and badly documented by Microsoft but
I have instructions that a friend made up that do seem to work.  He has
his entire collection of about 10,000 MIDI files in an Access database
from which he can click to play them on his Disklavier.  When the
Access database is made, you can add any fields you want and can sort
and search to find just about anything.  Sort of like an iTunes for
MIDI but much more customizable.

Best regards,
Spencer Chase