Well, yeah.
The problem with Access is that it supplies too many ‘simple’ solutions, that, I suspect, are incompatible with more advance functionality.
And it’s useless for calculated values. I’ll have to export all my data into Excel, calculate the stats, and then import them back to Access for a Report. Useless git of an application, Access is. Just learn VBA, which is about as easy as learning to talk.
There isn’t much you can’t do from Excel if you know how to throw a Form on it.
I am a senior systems analyst, an overall SQL expert, and a co-manager of 40 developers in India. I always explain that Access is basically too good for its own good. People try to push the functionality to 10 million records in one table and try to make it multi-user on a day to day basis. It can’t do that reliably. That is asking for trouble yet the alternatives are SQL Server or Oracle. They can cost mega bucks and some companies don’t want to pony up the cash even though forcing MS Access to do the job is asking for disaster. It isn’t MS Access that is the problem. It is a kick-ass application for a home or small business database and that is what it designed for.
But it’s incredibly difficult to use it’s full functionality.
Access is VBA Forms over a more streamlined Excel spreadsheet; I know VB, I (to brag a bit) kick ass on Excel, and I’ve been struggling for months trying to figure out the inherent capabilities of Access.
Why, WHY, create such flexible and powerful applications, with out adequate documentation?
No, no, no, a thousand times no. Access is a database application. The fact that tables are presented like spreadsheets is probably one of the single biggest design mistakes ever made, and responsible for more confusion than anything else I can think of.
This is the rub: Access makes perfect sense if you know a little bit about databases, but there doesn’t seem to be any really great source for users to learn from, and a lot of people wouldn’t bother with it if there were.
I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, a quick learner, and good at retaining what I learn. I’m fairly well-read, pretty good at math, creative and able to think outside the box. And I cannot for the life of me read music, no matter how many times people show me how - worse, I cannot grasp how anyone CAN read music. Now, if you hand me a guitar and tell me to play a C chord, I can do it. If you say the notes one by one to me as I play, I can follow along and after a few run-throughs I can play the song from memory. I’ve memorized “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “face in the space” and I can identify things like a quarter note, a full rest, a treble clef, etc. by sight. Put these things on a piece of paper with lines, and my brain sees a tossed salad that makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE AT ALL.
I always thought that I was really smart, until second grade…
Seriously, it was my first (and last!) semester of calculus, freshman year of college, that I simply did not understand. Somehow, I wound up with an “A” in that class – I think that my instructor, or perhaps one of his assistants, just miscalculated when adding my scores, or just felt sorry for me.
After that class, it was “Goodbye Science, Hello History Major!” for me!