Help on the designing of a databse for academic purposes

Hello to everyone,

I'm an accounting student at University of São Paulo, Brazil, and I need some advice on the design of a database. This database will be comprised of medium size familiar brazilian companies atributes, like:

1. Name
2. National ID
3. Address
4. Number of Employees
5. Net Revenue
6. E-mail
7. and so on...

The data will be took mainly from "Emis.com". So my questions are "Considering some important features like: easeness of use (consulting, manipulating and updating data) and verifiability- since this database will supply info for future scientific researchs and certainly will be audited to assure the veracity of the data- which would be the optimal design in this case? " and "Which program is the best for this purpose? An eletronic spreadsheet as MS Excel or a DBMS as MS Access ?

Ty in advance for your attention and please excuse me for any mistakes.