[AccessD] Tony's comments

Well, I'm a recent joiner of the forum, and a long-time lurker in
<http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/access-l.html>

40 years in IT - lots of mainframes (DB2, CICS etc.) Oracle & and PC's since 
the BBC-B &  IBM PC's came into the UK

When Windows NT & then 2K, with Office2K  were 'new' there was a lot of 
Access activity in business and on forums  - major reasons being:
Cheap (well, relatively) development platform,
Could be kept away from the main IT 'management' and infrastructure
Access 'Forms' and reports made it a reasonable knock-up facility - with 
input forms and report examples being (almost) as easy to create as working 
facilities as a set of mainframe based demo layouts, and the Access bits 
worked!
There was a reasonable inbuilt access control facility (if the site's 
web-police' didn't disable it.
AND
Most developers were on the second quarter of the learning curve (just 
before the steep bit!)

Then we got OFFICE XP, followed by 2003 - not that much change in the 
facility - so those learning had got to the point of being well skilled but 
not experts.
BUT
There were all those other facilities - PHP, HTML MySQL - and the Oracle 
facility got to be a fairly fully functional front-end GUI builder
Add to that Oracle and DB2 that worked on a PC.
And - Blogs blossomed, sand seeded all over everything

Meanwhile Access had done little to keep ahead of the competition.

THEN - we get 2007, 2010  and the 'user-control' gets 'adjusted' - there is 
the new Ribbon to learn ( not really an Access 'Tech' subject)
And Excel gets to be big enough that you really could do database 
menipulation and storage in it
AND
Management could avoid the second tier price premium for the product to be 
installed

So - yes, there are few 'learners' coming onto lists such as this
Yes - there are few questions being posed.
Similar happenings on the
<
<http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/access-l.html>
and
<http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/excel-l.html>
and even the beginners forum
<http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/excel-g.html>

So - if you want this forum to recover then I suspect the forum needs to 
become a bit more inviting to new users, and include such things as you seem 
to be putting into your blogs, or at least links to the working examples of 
problems beginners are liable to encounter

That way people would (perhaps) start reccomending it as a startpoint for 
help


Consider for instance -
Access forms are relatively easy compared to doing it in Excel.
So - how about some instructions as to how to generate data entry forms 
(with validation) in Access, and then use them in association with SQL data 
extraction insertion, update and deletion running with Excel as a front-end

Currently my usage and experience are such that I am unlikely to be posting 
solutions, but I'm still (probably) going to be lurking!


JimB



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Susan Harkins" <ssharkins at gmail.com>
To: "Access Developers discussion and problem solving" 
<accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2013 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [AccessD] Tony's comments


>> 2. "What is also obvious is that we are failing to attract new minnows. 
>> It's
>> possible that this is because the pool of ambitious Access power-users is
>> shrinking."
>>
>>  Those two points go to the heart of the matter; Access is a mature
>> product, other products have moved into it's niche, and as a result no 
>> one
>> is doing anything new with it.
>>
>>  For example, why is not anyone talking about Azure or Access web
>> databases?  Because no one (or very few) are doing anything with them. 
>> Most
>> of us have moved onto other things, so there is nothing new to talk 
>> about.
>> Tony's comment of "Nowadays new Access projects are drying up faster then
>> the Sahara"  is spot on.  It's not just here either, but everywhere. The
>> Access TA on EE was one of the top traffic areas since 1996 until 2011. 
>> Now
>> it's not even in the top 50 of the most active.  And I see the same thing
>> everywhere.   Anything that has to do with Access has dropped off the 
>> cliff
>> in the past couple of years.
>
> ===========I live in a very small Access cave, so my contribution to this 
> discussion is small, and ... probably askew. I can only go by my readers' 
> needs and questions. I receive no questions about Access. When I publish 
> an Access tip or article, no one comments. They're not even viewing the 
> page. Now, that might be because I'm not giving them what they want -- a 
> very likely scenario. But no one's asking for anything either. I can't 
> really draw much of a conclusion, but Access was once my bread and butter. 
> I didn't stop writing about it because I wanted to -- but because 
> publishers no longer wanted the content because subscribers no longer paid 
> for it.
>
> Susan H.