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.
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.
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.
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.