MS Access – An under utilised and under rated business tool

Lots of people own it, some tinker with it, a few are experts in it and most IT departments hate it.

Microsoft Access has been a part of the Office family for many years and has gradually evolved along with its siblings; Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like. In many office environments, people use it as a glorified spreadsheet package enabling far more simple solutions than Excel’s “vlookup” type scenarios and catering for much larger sets of data, but this is very much where the problem lies. Ask anyone in your IT department and they will say it’s rubbish as a database. It’s not rubbish, it is just that IT departments cannot support an application that has not been developed by themselves and more often than not has not been developed by a professional using standard and accepted conventions.

So you end up with a half baked product, developed by someone internally who has “a flair for these things”, the IT department won’t get involved and the originator has long gone. Little wonder MS Access gets the press that it does!

The truth is, developed properly; applications in MS Access can be powerful and extremely cost effective. Okay, if you have more than 20 users and are processing millions of records it won’t be powerful enough for your needs but most companies aren’t processing those volumes and don’t have that many employees, let alone users.

Let’s look at the positives;

There are absolutely no licenses required (apart from the license you get when you purchase MS Office)

1. Development costs are a fraction of that of client server based applications like SQL or Oracle (This is not just down to the programmers wages. When you commission a system using these platforms you also end up employing business analysts, project leaders, accountants and all sorts of other people making up the “development team”).
2. Development time is very quick by comparison.
3. It is extremely flexible and can be altered or added to without fuss.
4. Because it is part of MS Office it interacts seamlessly with it’s siblings
5. It can easily be upgraded to SQL if your volumes do start to overwhelm it.

On the not so positive side, it is not designed for online use. You can set-up forms that allow access to the application through a webpage but the database engine really isn’t powerful enough to cope in this scenario.

So, if you need online functionality, MS Access is probably not for you. But if you have any type of administrative functions that are repetitive and time consuming, a well designed Access application will save you a fortune in time and money.

Employ an established developer to design and build your application and you’ll see that Access can automate a multitude of business processes, make sure they offer good “after sales” and support services and I promise you will not look back