MS Access for Business : Overview
- Matthew Verity
- Jan 20, 2020
- 2 min read
My first assigned work as a programmer came in 1994 when I was asked by the school yearbook committee to develop a tool to capture information about my year 12 classmates for eventual publication into the yearbook. Keen to show off my developing skills as a programmer I jumped at the chance and while I was focusing my learning around Visual Basic I had started to play with Microsoft Access and saw this as the best option. Happily I can say I still have a copy of that yearbook to this date and the output from that project printed within.
Some 25 years on, Access remains one of those tools I keep returning to time after time. Whether as a direct solution for an application, a support tool or as a way to build heavy data manipulation capability quickly, MS Access provides a pragmatic, lite and rapid way of getting results fast.
Like most technologies, along with its benefits it does have its limitations; limitations that naysayers are all to quick to point out as ruling MS Access out as a useful tool in any way. I too am in agreement with the naysayers and am myself all too happy to advise caution at times but as with all technologies it comes down to weighing up the benefits vs the risks in making the final decision.
For the start of 2019, I've decided to document several quick posts to document the benefits and the risks in selecting MS access for your next project. Along with this overview I am publishing Part 1 : Rapid Application Development which discusses the use of MS Access as a way to build an application in an Agile manner. In addressing and ensuring that I cover off the "risk" side of things, I will address risk even in the benefit related posts but in later posts, I will cover off the risks (or more correctly considerations) to keep in mind to provide a simple benefits/risks matrix.
This series of posts is not designed as the be all and end all in decision making, but is my attempt to at least arm you the reader with information to assist you the next time someone says "Have you considered MS Access ?"
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