Microsoft Access Team Blog

I came to Access from being an Excel geek.....I did lots of neat things in Excel primarily for myself.  I then got a job at a large regional bank in Commercial Ops.  The manager there slowly brought me over to the "dark side" of Access.  It took awhile to get the hang of VBA in Access because I had been used to recording macros in Excel and then altering them to my needs....it wasn't until I really began to focus on Access that I began to really grasp the true power of code; variables, looping, recordsets, DAO, etc.  As I learned more I was able to develop some really nifty tools for myself in my reporting position.  

However, the true "Aha" moment wasn't until I began to leverage my skills to build and automate processes for others.  In one of my first projects outside my own responsibilities I was able to take a 10 step reconciliation process being done by approx. 12 users separately in Excel and pull it into Access, lock down data entry errors, automate reporting while creating a easily searchable historical archive.  It was this first project, where I was able to make the jobs of others easier, faster, and more accurate that I realized that my Access skills could get and keep me a good job.  I was hooked.  I left that bank in 2006 but still keep in contact with folks there and my little reconciliation database is still being used.  I realize that in the world of Access apps its small potatoes but the primary point of any Access app should be to create value for the user, not just demonstrate skills and/or complexity.

I got a chance back in 1997 to do up a database for our Manufacturing Engineering department for Boeing.  That was what got me started on this path and now I'm a full-time Access developer.  What got me hooked was that I could create something so useful and not have to use one of those procedural programming languages like COBOL.

I am a teacher-librarian at a school for blind/visually impaired students. I taught myself Access to create a library maintenance/circulation system/online catalogue. I was totally hooked!

But my biggest Access "highs" have come when I have created applications for fellow staff. For example, a field-day management application to automate our school's field-day: it turned a week's worth of paper and pencil organization for the gym staff into a couple of hours of data entry. Or an application for a teacher in the cooperative education area to manage a "Careers" day at the school. She can't stop talking about how wonderful it is and how much time and effort it has saved! Helping people with projects like this are what keeps my "Access" motor running!

When Access 1.00 was about to be released I was working on a major OS/2 - DB2 project for nearly two years and all we had done is talk and talk and produce hefty volumes of specifications (designed to confuse the user or so it seemed).

After a week with the Access 1.00 $99 intro box I had created the whole system as a fully functional prototype.

For a while I used Access as a prototyper to show the users what they were asking for but being in the corporate environment it would then take years to finally give them the "serious" system with the forest of documentation.

I more or less dumped the corporates within 6 months of the release of Access 1.0 to develop for small to medium sized businesses and the only documentation between them and me was the developing system.

Before Access no PC based database product was worth considering as I had come from DB2 and was a Business Analyst and Relational Database Designer and none of the products were even close to being slightly relational (no matter what the marketing said).

To this day recent editions of Jet/ACE cannot model larger problem domains because of the 32 limit on indices introduced with rushmore. I still sometimes use Access 2 to data model the complex systems prior to implementation on another platform.

"How did you feel when you got your first Access fix?" Free!

Free to design, develop and deploy.