Future of Access

[Deleted Bruce 182381]

Hello Everyone,

I had recently joined the UtterAccess forum, but unfortunately that site was permanently shutdown without any advance warning. I am a team member of four Access developers and we are concerned about the stability and future of Access.

 

[Jon]

Welcome to Access World! We're so happy to have you join us as a member of our community. As the most active Microsoft Access discussion forum on the internet, with posts dating back more than 20 years, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with you.

We're a friendly and helpful community, so don't hesitate to ask any questions you have or share your own experiences with Access. We're here to support you and help you get the most out of this powerful database program.

To get started, we recommend reading the post linked below. It contains important information for all new users of the forum:

https://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/threads/new-member-read-me-first.223250/

We hope you have a great time participating in the discussion and learning from other Access enthusiasts. We look forward to having you around!

 

[theDBguy]

Hi. Welcome to AWF!

 

[NauticalGent]

Welcome aboard!

UA's demise and the future of Access have nothing to do with each other.

 

[NauticalGent]

I think MS will never retire Access because many government agencies and private enterprises have Access applications running for several decades, and the time and cost to convert them to web applications is significant.

All good points, I would add that there is simply no single source replacement, and since just about EVERY work station on the government workstations already HAVE Access, the decision is really a no-brainer.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Yeah, pretty much every government workstation has a copy of Access preinstalled, but hardly anyone knows what it actually is let alone how to program with it. And when it comes to IT departments, they're almost universally against because of it ability to run automated.

 

[NauticalGent]

they're almost universally against because of it ability to run automated.

As are ALL Office products, but what do we know??

 

[AccessBlaster]

As are ALL Office products, but what do we know??

The member of the suite they fear most is the one they understand least.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Every so often we hear the "Access is going away" comments, then they die down as a new version of Office gets released and Access is still available. There will probably be some limitations on new features in Access, because if MS does TOO MUCH to make it nicer, it will start to compete with SQL Lite.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Jet and ACE are database engines. I know you know that but even you equate Access the RAD tool with SQL Server.

Only for ease of discussion. I know the difference between Access, the self-contained RAD tool and SQL Server / ORACLE / SYBASE / etc. as active SQL engines. But sometimes I will verbally compare Access and SQL Server in an isolated way. Verbal shorthand consistent with the thread under consideration.

 

[AccessBlaster]

It’s weird because I never hear this kind of criticism with other similar products. There’s always this cloud hanging over Access sometimes it’s the community, other times it’s the perceived lack of interest from the Microsoft Access team. It’s all very confusing.

 

[AngelSpeaks]

Back in the 1970's and 80's I used a mainframe based report writing tool named FOCUS that had the ability to link with all kinds of datasets. It also had a native datastore, but unlike Access, it was hardly ever used for storing data. I don't see Access as stepping on SQL-Server's toes. I see it as a productivity tool that integrates well with other Office components, like Excel, Word, Classic Outlook, and has the ability to connect with any db via ODBC. You can't blame non developers for building homebrew Access applications when IT departments were unable to timely provide their needs, or its a small business with no IT department that has a limited budget and wants to stop using Excel to run their business. I don't see IT's bashing Excel, despite it being a bigger security risk than Access.

I remember FOCUS. I went to their users convention in Orlando in the early 1980s. Our IT department did a lot with it.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In my early days as a Navy Contractor (and with a now-defunct SQL engine as the back-end), we used Crystal Reports regularly.

 

[sonic8]

That was main reason for Classic Outlook being replaced with webmail Outlook.

No. If that were the reason, they could have just disabled or removed VBA/Automation in/of Outlook.

The primary reason is that there are three different editions of Outlook (desktop/web/mobile) with completely different code bases. For calendar and tasks there are even more. This creates huge maintenance overhead.
Microsoft want to unify all these applications in one single code base and thus minimize the maintenance effort.

 

[gemma-the-husky]

I always preferred AWF to utter access but I can't believe it has just closed. Does anyone know why?
On my phone, it's just hanging with no information.

 

[sonic8]

Excel, Word and other Office components also have desktop, mobile, and web versions.
Is MS also going to deprecate their desktop and mobile versions to maintain a single web code base?

I'm not aware of any plan for this.
I'm sure they would like to do that. However, VBA usage in Word and Excel is probably a thousand times more common than in Outlook. So, for now they cannot do anything like this without antagonizing a huge number of their customers.

 

[amorosik]

Does anyone remember Crystal Reports? Microsoft used to bundle it with Visual Studio 2003 and then they replaced Crystal with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).

I've used CR from version 5.0 onward on projects created with Visual Basic 6.0.
Even recently, when it entered the SAP umbrella, I used version 2020 to print reports and allow the end user to edit them independently
In my opinion, it's an excellent tool, superior to Access's native reports

 

[Steve R.]

Hello Everyone,

I had recently joined the UtterAccess forum, but unfortunately that site was permanently shutdown without any advance warning. I am a team member of four Access developers and we are concerned about the stability and future of Access.

MS Access was a go-to database. That's where I got my database experience. Time however marches on, things evolve. The apparent shutdown of UtterAcess may or may not be an indicator that MS Access relevancy is waning. Don't get me wrong, MS Access is a good database. Nevertheless, open source databases, such as MariaDB integrated with Apache, PHP, and HTML offer excellent state-of-the-art alternatives to MS Access.

Since you expressed concern "about the stability and future of Access"; you may want to examine continued reliance on MS Access and compare that to other state-of-the-art database solutions. As a quick note, using and implement open source solutions is "free".

PS: When I was doing MS Access database development (years ago), a major roadblock, was (unbelievably) the IT Department. The IT Department kept trying to stamp-out the use of MS Access where I worked!!! This lack of support by some IT Departments is a concern "about the stability and future of Access".

 

[AccessBlaster]

Access is fantastic if your organization supports using it. But, alot of us fall into a different category. We see an issue that Access is perfect for solving, but IT and management are skeptical of it, creating the classic Access struggle.

 

[Isaac]

That is exactly the problem the SQL Server people see and why they perpetually bad mouth Access. They think of Jet/ACE as competitors and never understand that Access is a RAD tool that builds interfaces and is NOT a database engine. Jet and ACE are database engines. I know you know that but even you equate Access the RAD tool with SQL Server.

As far as SQL Server is concerned, they should be thinking of Access the RAD tool as a complementary tool and not as a competitor. The fact that they don't tells us that MS doesn't market Access, the RAD tool correctly.

Yes, Access FE with SQL Server BE is powerful, versatile, and just all around great.