Access - Devastation (1 Viewer)

[gemma-the-husky]

It seems to me that the future of Access is ....Excel. which is a sad state of affairs.

 

[Cotswold]

Microsoft's Options

1. Abandon Access and the millions of users. (as they did with Foxpro)
2. Continue with Access development and support
3. Create a new system that Access users will happily convert to
4. Create a poor system that Microsoft demand we convert to resulting in decline

If (1) is chosen, you can be possibly use Access for up to 15 years or so before a replacement is necessary. So plenty of time to find out just who will pay for the switch (probably) away from Microsoft.
My opinion is it will be (2) for the foreseeable, (3) improbable and (4) most likely on previous form

 

[Pat Hartman]

So far, they've made four poor attempts to provide a web solution for Access. But that's because they don't actually listen to the request. Asking to be able to work with Access over the internet doesn't mean people want Access to work in a web browser. What we really need is a ODBC driver that makes it feasible to link to databases over a WAN and achieve response speed that is faster than paint drying which is what we have now. If Web pages can do it, surely Access can do it. It won't be easy because Access is pretty tightly tied to its data sources and maybe that is why they've never tried.

 

[canyonraven]

Please forgive me if I gave the wrong impression earlier, I really do enjoy Access, SQL and VBA. Like the Doc Man's career path, I started with Honeywell mainframes and VAX minis with Fortran, then C/C++ on Sun UNIX boxes, early Mac's with Pascal, a few years integrating Oracle dbs with GIS, then Java and VBA in academia then state and federal government.

I stuck with VBA, SQL and MS Access mostly, I guess, because it put food on the table for 20 yrs. It's been one hell of a useful product and is still very much in demand by my users. And I intend to retire someday, still coding in VBA.

But I get asked by straight-out-college young data analysts about what tools they should consider. And I do in fact recommend Python, SQL products that play well with the cloud (e.g., Azure SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL), and R if they are into statistics. If they are planning to migrate Access databases to the cloud, (and there will be plenty of opportunity for that), then yes, they better learn Access and VBA as well.