I worked for a furniture company that used Access for everything and I mean everything. HR, Payroll, inventory, ordering, dispatching, security, etc. One amusing use was having to make an entry that you took a soda from the break room. Totally on the honor system. You filled out an Access Form that payroll then billed you for (provided they remembered to actually do it).

My job was to get them y2k compliant and then start modernizing them.

Here is how the modernizing went. I was told to upgrade them from Access 2.0 to Access 2000.

Everyday users sucked down data from Oracle to run queries and processes that I developed. Users had access to everything, so a user could modify one of my queries. When it broke, I had to remember what the original query was. I did this by always housing a copy of the Access database on my local machine.

Every Tuesday Payroll was run at 5pm. Guess what? Every Tuesday I was there until 11pm as something always went wrong in the process. There were these misc pieces of compiled code other developers had written that nobody know what it did or had source for. Example: one developer wrote a piece of code in QBasic, compiled it and made it part of the process to strip out white space from data that was read in via a text file. He lost the source. When there were problems with this step he denied it was his code. Every database used this piece of code and everything broke.

I digress. I loved Access for what I could do with it. It served a purpose. It wasn't the best but it is what I had to work with to put food on the table. Now-a-days, using tools like MySQL Workbench and TOAD give me some of the same sense of creating views and queries to re-use but obviously these are not replacements for everything Access allowed you to do.