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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

I was agreeing with you, but as I thought about it, I remembered MS Access. It is used, often ships with Office, but still isn't close to as popular as Excel. Either the model is wrong, or the need isn't there.

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MS Access has awful UX. I've used it on and off over the years and can never find my 'flow state' as nothing in that program seems to flow at all.

If MS prioritised working on it it may have helped lift some people out of Excel and into DBA-lite territory but not in its current state.

In my experience, the main problem is that while Excel "distributed code versioning" with a whole bunch of copies around is awful, Access databases are not only much more prone to corruption and data loss in general (even in single user, non-simultaneous ideal use cases, never mind people attempting to multiplayer edit it over network shares...), it's often very hard for non-programmers to get any insights on any data you threw on it without using Excel in the first place.

So if the data is coming from Excel, and being extracted back to Excel, why use anything besides Excel?

Access used to be pretty standard for a small business trying to improve their situation, but we in the software development world spent so much time trying to work around limitations of Access and upgrading growing businesses out of Access that we took it personally and shouted to everyone not to use Access.

However, it is still taught in IT classes as a useful tool for small businesses, and it is.

My very first paid web gig was connecting a small business' Access based product catalog to their website. I was 14 or 15 at the time. I was able to do it with out any real coding knowledge except for some basic HTML I learned from MySpace and some copy-paste VBScript, haha. The site was a hit and I made $1,200 and immediately spent it all on an electric guitar.

MS Access isn't as good. Again, e.g. Hypercard.

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