And no, things like Openoffice^W Libreoffice Base or Kexi are about 1,000,000 miles away from even being useable, much less good.
Access really delivered on that count. If it wasn't for the two factors of relatively poor performance (terrible performance when run "across" a network) and lack of cross-platform behaviour, it would be my go-to tool.
I think there really is demand for a cross platform database gui that sits on top of a serverless database file. If this file can be uploaded to a website that also enables excel-like data manipulation and then downloaded/shared back as a file for manipulation by this gui tool then even better.
If this tool is powerful enough to realise that it shouldn't try to execute across a network and somehow flip over to a "remote execution" mode where it targets a server rather than a file, then even better.
That's the dream, nothing has ever come close.
Opening an MDB across a network share. Opening large databases for long running simulations was par for the course at a company where I previously worked. One of the first things I did was make sure files were on a local drive before simulating which turned a 6 hour run into a minute long run.
What specific things made MS Access so easy to pickup and what made it powerful?
For anyone else that is looking for what was described above, I'd be pretty happy to work on something new for a change.
If you can please provide me some details (my email is in my profile), that would keep me motivated. My only gap in knowledge is MS Access and what it did well and what it didn't do well.
My experience was 8 years ago, its just so easy to hack something on a whim to solve some office task that's annoying (for internal use only, the security was a joke).
The graphical database designer tool was perhaps useful for non-techies too. And the forms could be extensively customized with VB script if it didn't do what you wanted out the tin (change this color when X happens etc).
I think anyone who inherited an access system saw the progression from taking an excel like interpretation, to putting forms on front of it, to trying to connect the forms, to ultimately print some form of report. It was CRUD within one app, that didn't require learning 37 different technologies to make one screen work.
At most, you might have to pick up VBA if you wanted to do something fancier.
As much as Access makes me cringe, seeing the apps that were reasonably well architected and talked to MSSQL backends didn't look too out of place.
1) You can copy a grid from excel, do a "paste as data" and access will automagically create a table, with the right data types and even pick up column names if headers are present.
2) You can view a table as a grid, similar to excel, and just start typing away to create data. You can do this before you even create the table to just start creating a table.
3) The drag / drop query builder is extremely easy, especially for things like cross tab queries. You can click "view as SQL" to then turn it into SQL if you want to tweak stuff. (I actually learned SQL this way)
4) foreign keys are made through a drag-drop interface "relationships"
5) The form wizard makes making forms really easy.
6) You can right click a row and delete the row. You can right click a column and delete the column. Any error messages are typically understandable and not cryptic.
7) All your data is in a file. A file which you know where it is, and you know you can click that file to open and see your tables and forms.
8) You can save queries which act almost like views / CTEs and in most queries you get a grid which you can just start editing data in if you so wish.
If anyone is unfamiliar with access I'd strongly recommending getting hold of a copy to play around with, it's how to do database right for end-users.
Some knowledge is usually required to make sense of the results though but I'd say a non-expert still has more chance with access than any other tool.
The result was a tool that power users (users who are very good with a computer, but not a full fledged programmer) could use to build some pretty amazing stuff.
It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but one of the amazing things about Access was the way it could figure out what you wanted to do through a wizard. Provided your tables and relationships were set up correctly, you could do some powerful stuff. For example, if you have two tables with a 1:many relationship, you can display a form with a sub-form where the data is linked. Navigating between records in the parent form would automatically load data in the sub-form.
It's a product that you really should use a little if you're really interested in a project. Despite its warts, Access was a really incredible and ambitious product.
Jeff Atwood quoting Benjamin Pollack
" Developers think cloning a site like StackOverflow is easy for the same reason that open-source software remains such a horrible pain in the ass to use. When you put a developer in front of StackOverflow, they don't really see StackOverflow. What they actually see is this:
create table QUESTION (ID identity primary key,
TITLE varchar(255),
BODY text,
UPVOTES integer not null default 0,
DOWNVOTES integer not null default 0,
USER integer references USER(ID));
create table RESPONSE (ID identity primary key,
BODY text,
UPVOTES integer not null default 0,
DOWNVOTES integer not null default 0,
QUESTION integer references QUESTION(ID))[1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ Appropriately enough the blog is complaining about the attitude being displayed on Hacker News
* Microsoft Office (slightly out of date version) * Internet Explorer 8 or less * Adobe Reader * Crappy SharePoint installation
If someone can find a way to replace Access that doesn't involve going through corporate IT's 50-year long approval/installation process, it'll be a massive hit.
However, there are always going to be a lot of people who do work in vast, stuck-in-their-ways corporations - banks, energy companies and other MNCs.
An Access replacement would be aimed at these people, not a specific individual who could just 'find a job at a more agile company'. As a result, it could be very successful.
So clearly there is, in fact, a big deal. If you think you can write Access in a weekend, feel free, post it here when you're done. Good luck!
... which is why we started from the problem of document compatibility (something I really wish GDocs and Numbers for iOS focused on). In the process of building and discovering test cases (repo: https://github.com/SheetJS/test_files) we found and reported bugs in OO, Apache POI, roo, xlrd and other parsers
https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls and https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx are the parsers underlying this.
I'm not sure if it would do what you'd want since we're not trying to replicate many of the power features of Access, but would love to hear your feedback.
Phprunner.com is another one that is a little like this genre.
Is a big shame that MS get rid of Visual FoxPro. I still dream of build something like that.
What make VFP far-far-far better than Acces? Powerfull data/dbase language (instead of basic basic), You can code triggers/stored procedures/views, etc with the fox language itself (same for reports, forms, menus, etc= Everything is Fox and fox only).
Good enough to build full complex apps. Decent wizards.
Probable the only good thing that acces have instead of fox is better looking GUIS and better form builder..
The architects would be the WP designers, creating the ERP "themes". Sounds neat to me.
Using Access was amazing. It made it trivial to build a functional, if ugly, UI that was perfect for inside a corporate environment.