Future of Access

[CompSMART]

Back in my first semester of grad school, one of my professors gave me a copy of Access and asked me to load it on my computer and see if I could take some data he had in spreadsheets, import the data into Access, manipulate and report on the data. It's very hard for me to grasp the reality of that being 33 years ago and that I've been working with Access (either FT or PT) ever since. I've been hearing of Access' demise for almost that entire 33 years too (ha-ha). Microsoft can do whatever it wants with Access - but it would be very difficult for Microsoft to ignore the fact that the number of applications developed in Access over the course of 33 years is probably deep in the millions - with some portion of those still in use - and a significant portion of those in use considered mission critical by the organizations using them.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Microsoft can and will do as they damned well please. However, there is a certain imprimatur to having a database product as part of Office. What usually happens with the other big companies is that at some point they have a product that they feel is dragging them down, so they spin it off to be on its own or as part of a limited subsidiary. If some day we hear that Access is going its separate way from the rest of office, I would be sad but not at all surprised. On the other hand, if Microdumb doesn't allow for a cadre of rogue software engineers to take over the spin-off, I would be terribly surprised.

 

[BlueSpruce]

Microsoft can and will do as they damned well please. However, there is a certain imprimatur to having a database product as part of Office. What usually happens with the other big companies is that at some point they have a product that they feel is dragging them down, so they spin it off to be on its own or as part of a limited subsidiary. If some day we hear that Access is going its separate way from the rest of office, I would be sad but not at all surprised. On the other hand, if Microdumb doesn't allow for a cadre of rogue software engineers to take over the spin-off, I would be terribly surprised.

I don't think Access will breakaway from Office because vba is the glue that holds all the Office tools together. However, if MS decides to deprecate vba and just go with Online Office, which currently includes Excel, Word, and Outlook, then Desktop Access will be on its own.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I don't think Access will breakaway from Office because vba is the glue that holds all the Office tools together. However, if MS decides to deprecate vba and just go with Online Office, which currently includes Excel, Word, and Outlook, then Desktop Access will be on its own.

Excel/Outlook = actively invested, future-proofed.
PowerApps/Dataverse = where Microsoft wants people to go next.
Access = maintained, but sidelined.

 

[BlueSpruce]

Excel/Outlook = actively invested, future-proofed.
PowerApps/Dataverse = where Microsoft wants people to go next.
Access = maintained, but sidelined.

MS may want Access users to migrate to PA, but if PA cannot fulfill all the needs their Access apps currently delivers, users will continue using Access, as several have been doing for decades. MS is concerned about vba being a high security risk. That's why they wanted to retire desktop Outlook.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Clipchamp probably gets more advertising dollars than Access, just sayin.

 

[BlueSpruce]

Clipchamp probably gets more advertising dollars than Access, just sayin.

How many years ago did you last see MS mention Access when promoting Office/M365?.. I remember seeing brief blurbs about Access in Office Professional 2010.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Access is basically in legacy mode

 

[AHeyne]

Also, and most importantly, the SQL Server team thinks of Access as a competitor because they don't even know what Access is and they think of it only in terms of Jet/ACE. So they don't even understand that many production Access applications rely on SQL Server or other RDBMS as their data store.

Do you really think they are so short-sighted and superficial?

Is that more your personal perception of the situation, or where do these statements originate from?

 

[GPGeorge]

MS may want Access users to migrate to PA, but if PA cannot fulfill all the needs their Access apps currently delivers. Therefore, users will continue using Access, as several have been doing for decades. MS is concerned about vba being a high security risk. That's why they wanted to retire desktop Outlook.

Fixed it for you.

 

[BlueSpruce]

Fixed it for you.

I said "if PA cannot fulfill..." because PA is young, Work In Progress, and may some day be as robust as Access, unless you know something we don't?

I remember you recently mimicking Access NW2 functionality with PA by making SQL Server Stored Procedures do the heavy lifting.

It's too bad we didn't have faith in Access Web Apps. By now it would've been robust and a viable Online Office tool.

How many years did it take for Access to become robust enough for developing complex applications?... Access 2.0 (1992) to Access 97?

 

[AccessBlaster]

True, but without web connectivity Access became a relic frozen in time. It was no longer growing and expanding, hence SQL.

 

[GPGeorge]

I said "if PA cannot fulfill..." because PA is young, Work In Progress, and may some day be as robust as Access, unless you know something we don't?

I remember you recently mimicking Access NW2 functionality with PA by making SQL Server Stored Procedures do the heavy lifting.

It's too bad we didn't have faith in Access Web Apps. By now it would've been robust and a viable Online Office tool.

How many years did it take for Access to become robust enough for developing complex applications?... Access 2.0 (1992) to Access 97?

While I was being tongue in cheek, I'm pretty well convinced that PowerApps simply can't compete on an equal footing with Access. You note that I resorted to SQL Server Stored procedures to get the functionality needed to replicate Northwind Developer. There's a good reason for that. The basic logic required even for the basic inventory management model in NW Dev would be a hard slog in PowerApps.

Other functions, like basic reporting, simply don't exist in the PowerApps environment. One can convert screens (think Access forms as the closest comparison) to PDFs. That's not close to the power and flexibility of an Access report.

Don't get me wrong. I think PowerApps will eventually be quite useful, particularly in a hybrid application where it can handle remote and off-site data entry tasks on a smart device. I think the primary barrier to PowerApps is the licensing model, which is geared to large institutional environments, not the typical applications which are the bread-and-butter of Access.

 

[BlueSpruce]

At least three different times, MS has tried to webify Access and failed miserably. Why? They were solving the wrong problem. What they needed to do was to rework ODBC to be less chatty so that Access could interface easily with remote databases. The current way ODBC works on a LAN is fine because LAN's are very fast. This doesn't work over the internet because WAN connections are extremely slow when compared to LAN connections so although I can link an Access FE running on my c drive with a BE in Shanghai and it will work correctly, it is like watching paint dry.

Once MS put the FE on the web, they were not replicating Access because none of the interfaces worked like real Access and so no existing app could be converted, we would have had to rewrite the app completely using an inferior tool. THAT's why none of the three tries succeeded.

I think MS' goal with AWA was for it to be fully web based while mimicking how we currently create objects in Access. I remember tinkering with that functionality back in 2013-14. However, web apps are based on stateless unbound architecture, whereas Access VBA works with COM based bound objects. Two different worlds. There's several things in VBA that you can't do in JavaScript, like manipulate Windows Filesystem, e.g. FSO, run shell commands, automate other Office applications, etc. unless a web browser addon is used, but that was a security catastrophe when IE6 had that capability. MS wants Office to eventually be fully online. They did beef up ODBC for SQL Server and Azure to make it more resilient, but their strategy is to move away from desktop clients, such as Classic Outlook. You know MS is "Everything on the web".

 

[AHeyne]

Your question is a bit snarky...

However, that was not the intention; it was meant purely objectively.

Thanks for your explanation.

 

[BlueSpruce]

While I was being tongue in cheek, I'm pretty well convinced that PowerApps simply can't compete on an equal footing with Access. You note that I resorted to SQL Server Stored procedures to get the functionality needed to replicate Northwind Developer. There's a good reason for that. The basic logic required even for the basic inventory management model in NW Dev would be a hard slog in PowerApps.

Other functions, like basic reporting, simply don't exist in the PowerApps environment. One can convert screens (think Access forms as the closest comparison) to PDFs. That's not close to the power and flexibility of an Access report.

Don't get me wrong. I think PowerApps will eventually be quite useful, particularly in a hybrid application where it can handle remote and off-site data entry tasks on a smart device. I think the primary barrier to PowerApps is the licensing model, which is geared to large institutional environments, not the typical applications which are the bread-and-butter of Access.

It currently seems like that now, however, since MS is fully invested into "Everything on the web", I would think in a couple of years PA will be more evolved, as long as MS sees corporate acceptance stats. Otherwise, PA will go away the same as AWA did a few years later. The consumer small biz space comprises the bulk of Access apps and MS needs to provide an affordable alternative to that space if they want users to migrate away from Desktop Access. Otherwise most will continue using what they have, and some will convert to web apps.

Is PowerBI still popular?

How many years did it take for Access to become robust enough for developing complex applications?... Access 2.0 (1992) to Access 97?

 

[cedar]

Also, someone mentioned that power apps are "young", but they've been around now for 7 years...

 

[BlueSpruce]

Also, someone mentioned that power apps are "young", but they've been around now for 7 years...

Feels "young" to me because I haven't heard much about it until lately by @GPGeorge.
Perhaps it will get better traction if MS extends its functionality and makes it more affordable?
Did PowerBI and PowerQuery gain traction?
I'm expecting to see a PowerAI emerge.

 

[cedar]

bluespruce you almost have to be right about that. I don't pay attention to it regularly, and it's been a few years now. But I think if it was maturing into anything like the versatility of Access I'd/we'd have heard about it. From day one, Lightswitch was much closer to what an Access dev would look for, Beth Massi was a world class resource, but Microsoft folded it so casually.

 

[BlueSpruce]

bluespruce you almost have to be right about that. I don't pay attention to it regularly, and it's been a few years now. But I think if it was maturing into anything like the versatility of Access I'd/we'd have heard about it. From day one, Lightswitch was much closer to what an Access dev would look for, Beth Massi was a world class resource, but Microsoft folded it so casually.

IIRC, LightSwitch replaced SilverLight, and positioned it as an LOB RAD tool, but it didn't gain much traction, and MS replaced it with PowerApps. Is PA similar to LightSwitch?

I thought AWA's was a viable solution because it mimicked how we create tables, queries, forms, and reports in Desktop Access. It essentially had the same client UI. Access developers had high expectations that it would have a VBA_like language, but instead relied on event based Data Macros and was lacking the rich functionality available with VBA. So only a handful of Access developers adopted AWA and MS retired it in 2017.

So here we are again, for the 4th time, in the same dilema. First it was "Data Access Pages", then came "Access Web Databases", "Access Web Apps", and now "PowerApps". Next up, "PowerAI". . . "Hey AI, build me a web app that works and looks just like Desktop Access NorthWinds2 application."