For such scenarios, Access is a vastly superior tool to Excel. In Access, you would create one table (a list) of employees, with each record containing the employee’s name and ID number.

Microsoft Access supports direct import of spreadsheet data from files you've created in Microsoft Excel or saved as XLS or XLSX files in another application capable of creating Excel-compatible ...

Microsoft Office is more than the sum of its parts—you can link an Excel database table to an Access database, integrating your data and adding value. Here's how.