MarkRennes
Registered User.
- Local time
- Today, 11:49
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2011
- Messages
- 13
I continue to tear my hair out that standalone Microsoft Access is not really web-accessible.
I've come to like and depend on Google Docs, now Drive; Since I work in a business school we use them via Google Apps for Education. All quite useful. We also teach our students basic Microsoft Access skills and even a bit of database analysis and design. But we can't easily make their databases web-accessible; I can't impose Office 365 on penniless students, nor does it serve dynamic public web pages.
There is no end user accessible database within the Google Apps world - the Google Cloud SQL offering is really only suitable for use by developers (and is expensive). People get round this by using well structured Google Spreadsheets as tables in the cloud. There is even a QUERY function which works a bit like an SQL SELECT statement - but only on one worksheet at a time. Ho hum.
So it occurs to me that there "ought" to be a way of making a well-structured Google Spreadsheet worksheet act as an ODBC data source, so that users can put data into a Google Spreadsheet - e.g. via the rather wonderful Google Forms facility, and that data can be visible in a Microsoft Access database.
Turn this scenario on its head, and there must be a significant need for bridging Microsoft Access into the Google ecosystem.
Is anyone aware of existing software that enables a Google Spreadsheet to be a server to Access? and / or for an Access database to be a server to Google Docs?
I've come to like and depend on Google Docs, now Drive; Since I work in a business school we use them via Google Apps for Education. All quite useful. We also teach our students basic Microsoft Access skills and even a bit of database analysis and design. But we can't easily make their databases web-accessible; I can't impose Office 365 on penniless students, nor does it serve dynamic public web pages.
There is no end user accessible database within the Google Apps world - the Google Cloud SQL offering is really only suitable for use by developers (and is expensive). People get round this by using well structured Google Spreadsheets as tables in the cloud. There is even a QUERY function which works a bit like an SQL SELECT statement - but only on one worksheet at a time. Ho hum.
So it occurs to me that there "ought" to be a way of making a well-structured Google Spreadsheet worksheet act as an ODBC data source, so that users can put data into a Google Spreadsheet - e.g. via the rather wonderful Google Forms facility, and that data can be visible in a Microsoft Access database.
Turn this scenario on its head, and there must be a significant need for bridging Microsoft Access into the Google ecosystem.
Is anyone aware of existing software that enables a Google Spreadsheet to be a server to Access? and / or for an Access database to be a server to Google Docs?