The Workbench is never required as a platform for creating Mathematica applications.  If your application is going to be only a few pages long I recommend that you don't even think of learning to use the Workbench for such a small project.  However, although it will take you a fairly large amount of time to learn using the Workbench efficiently, if your project ever becomes big enough I would strongly recommend learning to use it.  At this point in my "Mathematica career" I only use Mathematica's front end for applications that are smaller than ~50 lines of code.  The navigation, editing tools and capabilities of the Workbench will quickly pay back when you are working on big projects.  In summary, the more time you dedicate to create Mathematica applications, the more likely the Workbench will help you use your time more efficiently.

The following code creates a table:
a = Table[{i,j,k,l,m,n}, {i,3}, {j,3},{k,3},{l,3},{m,3},{n,3}]
However when I use Part:
a[[1,3]]
I don't get anything close to the correct cell value. I get a list of the whole table.

However when I use RandomReal to build a Table instead of the built in iterators, Part works as expected.

Does anyone know why part works for one Table and not the other?

Thank you in advance.

August

Learning this system is pretty fun. Everytime I write a function with regards to testing and building lists, I find it already written somewhere later on. Clearly familiarity is the key. And putting in the time to learn it will pay off in the long run.

Workbench is for building Mathematica packages.  It enables you to edit the package and retest all in one environment (based on Eclipse).  As Michael posted, you don't need it for your application.