Microsoft Access Team Blog

No question about the use of Access 97 or 2000?  You might not have liked the answers.

Enable us to use third party controls like DevExpress Developer Experience, Enable us to compile the finish product to a single exe. Improve integration to backend database server like mysql,postgreSQL, 1 click web convert! if possible

Some of the choices in the survery are not particularly relevant to independent Access developers and there is no n/a available. I suppose I could have given answers based on my customers' companies.... However, you do get to select from a list of things you would most like to see added to Access (and presumably which MS think are possible) as well as explaining why you want it.

I agree with Alan. The choices for independents weren't very good. Also, as Alan mentioned, there was no n/a (or none) choice.

I forget which ones now, but there were a couple of questions where more than one choice would have been approiate.

Sco

I long for a real SQL-Server backend with identical features like Jet but more than 32 indizes per table! and better multi-user performance. MS-SQL-Server is too big, complex and there are tons of functions I do not need for my customers. Access is an excellent frontend, but a > 10 years old fileserver-backend is not useful. Better controls like sevGraph or solutions:::schedule (gantt) would be great, but leave Internet to LAMP.

Alan Cossey: Totally agree with you. I won't participate in the survey.

You know... I used to love Access .  

If I can help the guys to get the software back on track again then I am willing to participate, but, hardly any of those questions are relevant to what I do or have done with Access.

Garry

Yeah...the questions were not well-suited to consultant' needs, also the free-test answers areas were far too small (1024/2048 characters would have been a MUCH better choice as test length limits!).

Dan Steele, I asked a question like that of our LinkedIn.com's group "Microsoft Access Professional Developers Network" members a little while back about the use/adoption of Access 2007 -vs- earlier versions. The answers were quite interesting...or perhaps I should say, distressing for the MS Access 2007 enthusiast crowd at MS (and elsewhere).

MS: I would think the greatest thing Microsoft could do to "enhance Access' appeal" to the business/IT community is to create a REAL, USEFUL path to evolve/code-generate MS Access prototyped applications to *REAL* .Net / ASP.Net applications suitable for actual production use in WAN/Remote-office situations - with all the requisite security and connectivity/synchronization layers included!

...Yeah, I know - I'd also like new clean, unlimited energy supplies for the USA to free us from the foreign energy political and economic entanglements we now face too...call me a dreamer if you want.  :-)

Mark Burns: Could you pass a link to LinkedIn.com's group - discussion about A2007, please?

1) Add VSTA similar to InfoPath.

2) Make deployment easy, consistent and cost effective. Management wants IT to solve business problems not spend money on deployment.

3) Make SQL features such as Stored Procedures a more integrated part of Access.

4) Re-brand Access as “SQL Desktop Designer”. Access is a great tool, but has such a bad perception that most developers probably do not want to deal with the “politics” around using Access.

5) Add the ability to save Access reports as SQL Reporting Services reports so one can design one report.

6) Add the ability to use any .NET control in Access with easy deployment.

7) Add spell check to the Runtime.

8) Create a better Expression Builder with IntelliSense. Check out AlphaFive for an example. The Expression Builder is very old.

9) Add the ability to create .NET user controls from Access forms or control groups for better code re-use.

10) Add native web browser control with full DHTML DOM and spell check for AJAX style Access development.

The survey was not well laid out for independents like me. I really like Derrick's idea about SQL Desktop Designer.

Obviously the questions are designed to get the answers you want. Aimed primarily at corporate losers.

Only saw questions 1 to 6 because on some questions no options applied to me or my clients.

In fact in the multi-choice one none of the options applied and in some of the single choices more than one applied.

Very poor survey indeed.

BTW Access 97 is still widespread.

Obviously the questionaire simple and brief as it is is yet further proof that "developers" are not the target of the lastest and future versions of Access.

BTW Better integration with DB2 Viper would be nice but very unlikely as even integration with SQL Server is worse on the LATEST (as opposed to lastest) version.

I agree.  Questions are not geared to the developer/consultant.  

I answered the survey questions based on how my average client uses Access.

I guess you guys really don't know who reads this blog.  

Suprise!  Access Developers read this blog.  

I have never read a comment here that was clearly coming from a user of Access.  Most are clearly devs who have plenty of suggestions for improvement.  A single dev can provide many times the user experience than a single Access user can provide.  We work with hundreds of them all the time.  We read this blog because have a business stake in how the product evolves so we want to know about what's on the way for devs(or often what's not on the way).  

Anyway, I'm looking forward to v14 and hope to see Sharepoint integration with SQL Server tables exposed as SP lists.  It would be a shame if this is not top priority in both Access and sharepoint teams for the next release.  2007 export to Sharepoint is nice but very few of my apps have tables with under a few thousand records.  I assume exposing SQL server tables as SP lists would remove the performance issues limitation on the number of 'items' (records) in a SP list.

Any chance of a Access-WSS Developer toolkit that would allow locked down version of Access Web Services to install on WSS without having to purchase MOSS?  I see the cost of

MOSS being a big hurdle for many of my small business clients.  I also think such an option would allow devs\consultants to expose companies to Access Web Services who would otherrwise most likely overlook the new features.  Seeing it in action would help them to understand how purchasing MOSS would benefit their users.

Josh

It's quite indicative that Microsoft has no idea about the user base. Access has been in development already for several decades, and Microsoft still thinks it's being used by ordinary users as "personal productivity tool". This would be amazing if it was not so sad. This is why with very rare exception, all developments we see in the products that are not explicitly developer-oriented, have been having zero correlation with what the actual users want. Be it Office or Microsoft Money - do a simple experiment: go to groups.google.com, find any of the newsgroups dedicated to these products, search for messages dated, say, 5 years ago, and in 10 minutes you will gather 100 wishes from the real users. Now compare that to what actually has been done. Good luck finding one common issue. I guess Microsoft is gathering their ideas from so called "focus groups" consisting of the people they gather from 3rd party survey providers, and who answer the questions already geared towards specific answers, such as we just saw in this survey, and who are rewarded for the survey with a product worth hundreds of dollars. How I know? I participated once, after which sold the reward on eBay for about $300. Yeah, sure, very, very objective results can be obtained by this method.

Speaking of Access, I have been submitting wishes during every beta of every MS Office since I think 2000. To no avail. Some remarkable ones:

1. provide version signature in the adp and ade, so the product could be upgraded by standard deployment practices.

2. stop hardcoding developer's machine name in the connection string of the adp, so every user appears in sql server connecting from that hardcoded machine.

3. speaking of the deployment, put administrative sequence in the installation of Access Runtime, so these hotfixes you are issuing could be actually applied. Once there, run ICE validation of your installation and eliminate those hundreds of red violations. If you don't know what is administrative sequence and what is ICE validation, ask MCI team, they happen to be in the your own company, maybe in your own building.

Though of course, all that makes no sense if Access is thought as "personal productivity tool", lol.

Yes to all the above comments the Questions were not geared to the developer/consultant.

I really do wonder if you take notice of who reads this blog.  

We are ALL developers that based our lives on Access Development yet, you have ignored us for YEARS! come on throw us a life line with Access 14 PLEASE!!!!!!

To some of the commenters, once in a while you do see corporate IT or plain-old-user types posting here, but it is rare. The survey succeeded admirably in frustrating most of us, as you can read.

Once again, the survey seems to express the undisguised focus of the Access dev team towards corporate IT departments. I reckon it's got to do with the number of copies of Office Pro they hope to sell to those big shops...it does make sense, in a way.

I wish MS would make a version for devs and charge us for it. I'd be more than happy to pay more than what visual studio costs for a developer oriented edition of Access. The people that normally post comments on this board would agree on 90% of that version's feature set.

I'll quote one part of my survey response to the question re our org's Access policy:

"We try to stay away from Access 2007 as much as we can. Only one client has needed a product moved to 2007. Because of ribbon etc we've been successful in discouraging the 'upgrade' to 2007 for the rest of our clients."

No, I don't enjoy educating my clients re why the upgrade would be a mistake. But you left me no choice.

As a professional MS developer/contractor since 1995 (previously a C programmer), I've had opportunity to work with a great many public/private organisations both large and small (all in Australia).

The most apparent things I have observed is that:

* Very few users use Access as a personal productivity tool.  Almost without fail, they use Excel for that purpose.  

* The vast bulk of Access 'users', use it simply because the application (programmed by someone else) happens to be written in Access.  In fact, it would be safe to say that most Access 'users' aren't really aware they are using Access at all, but rather think in terms of the application itself.

* In most cases, such Access applications are written/maintained in-house by developers who are not the typical users of the application.

* In the large majority of cases, a full copy of Access is installed so that users may use such applications.  I see relatively few runtime installations in use.

From the above, I have to conclude that it is the need to use *developed applications* that drive the purchase of MS Access licenses by corporations.  

Although making Access easier to use for the average non-technical user is admirable, the fact is you are still competing with Excel.  In the end, most will use Excel because that's what most people are familiar with.  

The bottom line is that to drive sales of MS Access licenses, you need to appeal to developers/IT Managers who make and deploy and support the apps (that require MS Access licenses) that are used by the company's staff.  

-Chris

I have to agree with most of the above apart from the runtime aspect - which is far from ideal at present and I am tempted to go back to deploying applications with Access 2000 runtime for speed, stability and reliability (better the devil you know) - Access 2007 full and runtime has close to put me out of business !

In my opinion MS should aim Access 2007 for retail end users and develop Access 2003 into a robust, professional development platform with the suggestions put forward in this and other postings.

Garry

Listen chaps (and chapesses) Access 2003 is the last developer version of Access.

As to the use of the runtime 99% of my users have the runtime installed and only the admin people have a full copy of Access installed.

Most of my users do not know or care about Access they only care about their business applications.

The 2007 runtime tagline "Powered by Microsoft Access" is not a price worth paying never mind the braindead Ribbon.

Access 2007 is for amateur corporate twiddlers and now the blog is heading that way too, makes sense.

Agree with you, Craig.

I think that end users will never visit the blog.

I have many doubts regarding the future of MS Access. So, I downloaded trial versions of Filemaker and Alpha Five . Both have excellent features, specially Alpha Five, regarding web application development and are easier in implementation for workgroups – no need of FMS addons....

But Access 2003 is simply the BEST regarding desktop form and report design.

Web implementation is in my opinion the top most priority for the next version of Access. As MS Access looks like moving towards costly MOSS integration I will have to look elsewhere. Whatever we say now, I believe that 95% of Access 14 is done.

Best regards. Sam Caro

Working for a fortune 300 corporation is not mutually exclusive to being a "developer". The corporate IT developer (me) does have the benefit of a more stable environment but I the goal of delivering compelling, stable runtime applications with a clear business value is no different.

ClintC:

1- Can you give us the results/conclusions of the survey ? Just curiosity...

2- When will Beta version of Access 14 be available?

Sam Caro.

Sorry to disappoint everyone who says the blog is just for Devs, but I am not a professional developer.  I work as an analyst (Not in IT) for a large healthcare company.  I am the "departmental power user" or "guru" term that you hear thrown around from time to time.  In addition to my regular reporting and data analysis duties, I develop multiuser networked FE/BE apps to support both my own as well as other departments within our company.

I felt many of the questions from the questionnaire were relevant to me.  I generally try to get my work done with as little IT involvement as I can manage.  Usually I just have to get a user list for a new Access app and then have IT create a private shared folder so I have a secure place to locate everything. Our company does not "officially" support Access but there are folks whom I can reach out to for unofficial help.  After that it's UtterAccess.com ; ).

For my own wish list, I would like to be able to more easily send & receive data from the web.....we have multiple departments here internally that deal with external vendors and consequently we have lots of spreadsheets flying around....you know, the multiple versions of the truth thing ?  What I've been able to do when asked is to build databases that are able to function as a single point of reference for data for multiple departments internally....get everyone on the same page.  However, we/I still have to deal with blending in data that we receive from external vendors.  Right now I to set myself up to receive data, either weekly or monthly, in a manner where I can easily blend it with our own internal data.  It would be nice to be able to port some of my Access tables to a web interface...even if it would only be for external vendors to be able to look up accounts and add notes.

I would also just like to say too that some of you folks need to lighten up a bit on both Access and especially Clint C. !!......We're a little over-wound for a Friday aren't we ?

One final point.....Access does not belong exclusively to developers....it belongs to the businesses that purchase it as well as the users that use it as well.

More than any other Office or even any Microsoft app, Access's user base has the broadest range of abilities than I can imagine, everyone from the lowly A/P rep keying GL entries into a form in a DB with half a dozen tables to professional developers building enterprise level apps.  Microsoft will always be trying to balance the needs of both these target groups as well as folks in between.....like me.

Best,

J.

I can safely be regarded as a dedicated independent Access developer and have all of the usual beefs about where MS is taking Access. But I would like to comment to my fellow Access devs that our perspective is in fact not the only valid perspective re Access. For example someone up there noted that most Access users are probably using apps built for them; ie they don't develop anything with Access, they use a composed application, and therefore MS's priority should be to support us Access devs. But I think it's clear that MS's drift with Access is an attempt to break that barrier - to configure Access such that a standard issue office worker might be able to use it productively and safely. Sharepoint is not even a relational db but it's finding a home in corporations because it can be fairly simple and safe to use.

Providing a reason for corporations to buy Office Pro with Access, which comes at quite a premium, has got to be a, or the, primary goal for the Access team and MS planners. I think Access devs are a microscopic source of revenue for them, which is why all of our bellowing gets us approximately nothing.

I don't know how we can convince MS to give us a tool that we are delighted with. The Access team does not seem tasked with 'making us happy'. No one at Microsoft seems to give a hoot, in fact. But if we're going to argue our case in here, we might as well present positions that are not so narrowly focused, or one sided, that the MS folk are tempted to just shrug and move on.

As someone said above, it might be that Access 2003 is the last developer version of Access, in the sense most of us understand the term. Visual Foxpro was a great product; and although it took a decade, every fox dev worried that MS was letting it die out; they have been proved right.

It's funny how people see things differently when looking at the same thing, isn't it. My job is based very much on developing Access-based apps for smallish companies and I develop using Access 2007 even when the customer is using Access 2002 or 2003. When I first used Access 2007, I was not very impressed, but have come to really like it with a couple of reservations. These are having to jump through a fair no. of hoops to get some decent security with an all-Access solution (just ditching the user-level security from previous versions was a cop-out IMHO) and a beef about the 2007 runtime not supporting off-line Sharepoint lists. Apart from that I find Access 2007 very useful as a development tool. By making things easier for end-users and power-users, they have made some stuff easier for me as a professional developer. Examples are the ribbon (what's that cry of "heretic!" I hear?), sorting and grouping in reports, the report view (inc. being able to use controls on them interactively), layout view, PDF generation (but when are you going to sort out the underlining problem?), much better looking forms and so on.

Having said that, there is still a nagging doubt in my mind about where Microsoft are heading with Access. Since quite a bit of emphasis has been put on its interaction with Sharepoint, it seems to me that Sharepoint ought to be made properly relational. If that was done, then it would be "Wow!".

Alan

You complete ignore the individual home user, which by definition is an individual developer except that he/she develops for him/herself.  I wonder what percentage of Access users fall in this category.  I have to admit that MS does everything to estrange those users: Access is not included in any base Office offering. You have to acquire it at a premium price.

I'm now in the process of evaluating whether to migrate my apllication to SQL server express or mySQL.

Alan Cossey: "Apart from that I find Access 2007 very useful as a development tool."

I've found A2007 buggy & unstable & incompatible with previous versions. MS people are now trying to fix some bugs. There's "A2007 bugs & issues & wishes" database I have created for Access developers and for Microsoft tech help. Not sure If I can publish the link here. Please, e-mail me you want the database: chewingun1 at yahoo dot ca.

I’m a self employed professional developer and network engineer. I have scores of Access apps in production, from Fortune 500 firms to very small businesses. I’ve been in this segment since dBase III , circa 1986.

 I‘ve been in hundreds of offices, and have never seen a home grown Access app; perhaps MS has data to the contrary, but I believe no one but us pros give Access any meaning  at all.

 I was amazed at how 2007 was toyed with; changes made for no rational productive reason – but seemingly only for the sake of change. MS looks to have abandoned sound engineering principles for marketing nonsense. As with the ruin of VB6 it seems no one there cares.    

  Access, in spite of this, is still the best thing going. If VBA is kept as it is , I’ll stay with it – but I am now looking to alternatives , as it’s clear the rug may be pulled out from under me at any time. It’s analogous to Vista, obviously – and this has led me quickly to Linux , PHP and MYSQL. Microsoft, don’t you realize it was several hundred thousand people like us who between 1986 and 1994 said “MS is better than Novell in networking and Windows is better than OS2, I’m pushing it on my customers ” ?    Don’t you see how this is no longer true ? Ubuntu , for God’s sake, is a pleasure compared to Vista, and Access is the only thing at all that keeps me selling any of your products.  

 Please  - a developer’s version of Access.

 An  SQL-Server backend.

 Dump the ribbon or let us turn it off; there always should have been a switch to go back to menus we all knew  (How did this happen  ? What was the psychology ????)

 Compile to an  EXE  would be nice.

 Learn a bit from VB6 ; stay with VBA as it is.

I regularly participate in Access ADP-related area on Experts-Exchange.com where developers (usually not very experienced) are asking questions and other "experts" answer them. Kind of dev support for everyone (of course Access is only one of the dozens of areas). This makes easy to see the general landscape of the problems, what the questions are about.

As of now, that general landscape, simplified, boils down to the following:

Many developers are now trying to implement or upgrade their solutions for their clients to Access 2007 (probably because the clients got used to the thought that every upgrade is a progress and therefore is kinda mandatory), and they are consistently finding that Access 2007 is crap.

80% of all the questions are either "why this worked in access 2003 but does not in 2007", or "why it has become 10 times slower in access 2007".

Remarkably, there was not a single question "how to implement this new cool feature of Access 2007" - if there's any.

If Microsoft is interested in the research a-la "what the users think", welcome to experts-exchange.com. You will see the problems and concerns of some very real developers, contrary to your fake "focus groups".

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.  Next time, give me more space.  I could have written much more than I did about enhancements that I would like to see in the next release.

After a bumpy start, I have come to really like many of the new features in Access 2007, especially the graphics and RTF support, and even multi-value fields.  

I would like to know how to better use Access with Groove.  The SMBs that I work with can afford Office Enterprise but MOSS/WSS is beyond their capabilities and pocketbooks.

I'd also like to see more integration with MapPoint.  For example, a button to output data stored in Access directly into MapPoint with map symbols and other features stored in the .accdb.    

Like anything, it takes time to understand how to use new features correctly.  I hope that many of my problems will go away when a few Access 2007 developers publish proven code to the user community.  I have been pretty disappointed to this point.  

I would personally like to see MSFT eliminate some of the object libraries.  Now there is old ADO, old DAO, DAO 2007 and I think ADO 2007.  Every new developer book that is published should include the library's name in the title so that we know what we are buying online.  

DRIVE ON.  Kick the new technology into high gear with 14.

On the subject of bugs, it would be good if there were an online list that we could refer to so that we knew that Microsoft at least knew about them. Is there an official way of informing Microsoft of bugs that we find?

Though it doesn't help much at present, folks, remember that the first versions using Jet 3 and then Jet 4 got bad press, but then improved in the next versions. Maybe that is what is happening here.

My hopes for SP2? That Microsoft will sort out the bugs known from early on, e.g. where you lose all changes you make to SQL in, say, the recordsource of a form, unless you remember to click in another property on the properties window. This bug was highlighted in Allen Browne's list of Access 2007 bugs last year and it is irritating beyone measure.

Allan: AFAIK there's no official MS bug reporting site. In this blog I've asked several times if there's such a place - Clint's response was to e-mail the bugs. When I created my "A2007 bugs & issues & wishes database" I was asked to consult the problems with local MS authorities. No wonder - at the moment there are almost 170 issues in my database... and still growing. Anything we try in A2007 is wrong - only a while ago a colleague of mine has tried to export a linked table to Excel... and he's got an error, of course. So we're going to explore what's happening and I'll probably add a new record to my "bug database".

I hope I'll soon have some response from MS CZ tech help. IMHO, Clint may be right - local tech help can clear up some problems, or, at least, consult them with local area offices (Eastern Europe). Unfortunatelly, MS CZ has no Access developer it their team!!! :-(

There is one way to secure the future of Access -interaction over the web. If Access 2007 could do that (efficiently) now it would be a world beater.

and would start to make people who look down there noses at it to produce business systems think a little differently.

MVF's (Multi Value Fields) are the dumbest thing in ACE and are there to support the non-relational thinking that is part of Sharepoint and no doubt people who do not have a sound grasp of Relational Database Design.

Using Access without that grasp is like using Word if you are illiterate.

BTW does the next version of ACE expose the MVF construct in the Relationships Window as was promised by one of the Program Managers a few years back.

To quote from my post in August 2006 on the newsgroups

They say this will (as opposed to may) be available in a "future" version of Access (Access 14?).

Suraj Poozhiyil (Program Manager, Microsoft) has said that the main reasons for the MVF and the lack of representation of the MVF in the Relationships

Window are:

1. for compatibility with SharePoint. (not the most popular product in the world, to say the least)

2. this release is focussed on power users rather than developers.

3. and they could not give a F--- about developers that insist on using Jet/ACE (I made that one up, didn't I?)

is there a simple solution to this ?

perhaps we need a "lite" version of access for the pwer users and a full blown version for the heavyweights - could be a two tier pricing approach as well - will satisfy the sales department

Ken H:

A2007 for the pwer users

A97 for the heavyweights

:-)

Vladimir Cvajniga:

>

A2007 for the pwer users

A97 for the heavyweights

>

Why, in your opinion, Access 97 is better for developers?

Bye

I would argue that Access 97 and Access 2003 are the best versions, some say Access 2003 edges it slightly although of the two only Access 2003 has the occasional crash (in development only).

Zen:

A97 is much more stable than A2007. Others say A97 is a "rok-solid" application.

A2007 is not fully compatible with previous versions of Access.

A2007 is buggy, even after SP1.

A2007's help is out of any use, at least in MSO 2007 CZ.

Zen:

A2007 is much slower that A97.

Zen:

There' no Ribbon & navigation pane in A97.

etc., etc., etc., ...