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Comment by james_s_tayler | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Airtable considered like modern day Access?

Except it requires your IT department to contract it, which makes it a non-starter for most "shadow IT" uses where Access excels.

Access running on your pc is also there because of your IT department.

Access running on your PC is because it comes bundled with MS Office suite, which is installed for you to have Word, Excel, PowerPoint and perhaps Outlook available. It's a great thing Microsoft didn't make it easy to unbundle them all, otherwise lot of places with Access wouldn't have it.

Not to mention, Access won't randomly break because Microsoft isn't likely to Move Fast and Break Things or suddenly get acquihired. And it will work over LAN even when you lose your Internet access. And, all your data - including schemas and forms you've made - is in actual file.

Plus, it's the normal shitty SaaS model for something that isn't enterprisey enough. So it's easy pickings for budget cuts.

Access is like a cockroach. It never dies as long as some Microsoft stuff is still around. The only thing that will kill it is subscription licensing -- Microsoft eventually take it away for Azure AirTableClone.

Does Airtable still require internet access? That's a non-starter for many businesses which only have intermittent internet access.

really? I mean, I get the aircraft carrier examples above but I reckon most business have internet access now. I reckon (in the UK) loads of one man bands run everything off their phones. They're probably more likely to have access to the internet than MS Access.

Yes, really. There are still many places that do not have internet access, some of them on purpose. e.g. military installations.

I have played a little with it but I found Access much more powerful and easier to use than Airtable.

I've only played with Access once in Uni so it's a bit hard to compare for me, but it sounds pretty similar.

I use it as my own version of Shadow IT for my wife's business when im just too time constrained to make her proper web apps to do stuff, and she's too reluctant to spend any money on things, I just whip up a solution in Airtable. She has a CRM I made her for managing her students and their balances. Works well and was super fast to put together.

It's pretty crazy capable as Airtable has various kinds of built in functions for math and string manipulation, plus it can do various kinds of relations, joins, aggregates and rollups. Heck the resulting table even exposes an API!

The only thing I can't really seem to do is business rule validation stuff that a typical CRUD app would contain.

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