These are excellent points, I think it’s underestimated how difficult it is to get approval and budget for a small project that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line or have huge savings. These small but impactful solutions using Access act as both a stepping stone to greater skill sets, a way to build POCs for non-tech or low-tech people, and to avoid months of politics in big organizations.

I’ve had projects that were red-taped before getting off the ground due to resources being placed elsewhere. I then take those project ideas, and instead build them in Access as a POC using shared drives, splitting the database, etc. By the time I have 100 users saying how useful the application is in a couple months, other bigger projects haven’t even finished a project plan. Meanwhile we’re then ready to scale the solution using an appropriate stack and basically can just say “replicate our POC features but improve performance, security, accessibility, etc”. So far that’s worked pretty well for me.

In summary: find people’s Excel files with a mess of VBA and formulas —> see if the use case should be expanded —> build POC in Access without permission/budget from a bunch of people —> see how it goes and then plan to scale with the evidence you’ve gathered from your POC.