Access or Excel? (1 Viewer)

[tmyers]

Pat is very correct. That was a lesson I learned too. There is a caveat that management doesn't always agree that the time needed to consider the next logical business step is worthwhile...until they ask for it and you have to rework certain things. So, hopefully your boss or your bosses boss gives you the leeway to take this approach.

All I have is time. I work on it during my spare time in the office and once in awhile when I am into it at home. For the most part I find it fun (albeit at times aggravating).

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I wish I could show you the Excel file for one of the large jobs we are currently doing. Its a multimillion dollar job (for just the lighting!) and my god, the workbook is a massive pain to navigate and find things. This job will last for years and it will only get worse.

Just to recap on something I've mentioned before, (maybe in this thread) - the difference with a database is that you don't have to search the whole database to find stuff. In fact you virtually never see the whole caboodle. You have to structure the design so you are sure you can't lose data in orphan records and structures. Once you do that, and you know that you can reconcile the total expenditure stored in the database - you can then have confidence that if you extract just the labour costs, or just the costs for Jan 2021, the figures you see will be reliable. Then you don't have to look for them. They just appear.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Access developers are in a unique situation. Larger projects on different platforms break down the tasks into multiple steps and multiple people are involved, starting with the initial analyst. This person/team interviews the users and gathers requirements including sources of data and ultimate outputs. The requirements go to a design team and they layout the solution and break it into manageable parts. Then we move on to the development team/teams and they take the high level design and break it down into pieces that can be implemented. After each part has been unit tested by the original developer, the parts are tested by the test team and then integrated into the larger application. Once pieces that can be understood by the users become available, we start user testing. After all the testing is done and everyone signs off, we then distribute to a large pool of testers to do a stress test and only after that is done can we release the app to the general population. And that takes yet another group of people. One of my clients, Sikorsky Helicopters, maker of Marine 1, has seven levels of testing before anything ever gets into production.

Access developers are responsible for everything except user testing. It is rare that a large project developer will ever even talk to a user so he can say, let's make an app to do x. But Access developers are more integrated into the user community and have a much better appreciation of the large picture ( or should) and so Access developers actually do make suggestions for new apps that can help their department.

This makes Access developers jacks of all trades and therefore to be successful, they are required to think well beyond the technical details of the task in front of them.