[AccessD] My Comments

Susan,

I have offered to show people at my shop how to do queries in Access
but nobody takes me up on it. Things that I can whip out in a few
moments take hours to do using straight SQL on an Oracle Database
unless they are very simple. Anything involving 3 or 4 tables I will
have done far faster than they will. I love the query builder in
Access. We have a couple important Access databases at our company,
all created by an outside contractor who is no longer available to do
repairs on when something gets broken. That isn't often but when it
happens, I get the call and it's always an emergency. All those apps
will eventually be rewritten in another tool and I would guess that
they will take hundreds of man hours to do them in those tools. Most
of my Access work is to query Oracle tables I connect to via ODBC,
extract and summarize data and spit out Excel for Finance, Accounting,
Legal and other departments. Those users come to me for solutions
because I can turn their requests around in a few minutes or maybe a
few hours if it's complicated and I can customize things to their
needs like reassigning product groupings in ways that the source
system doesn't even know about and give them exactly what they ask for
98% of the time. The stuff I do in those minutes or maybe hours would
take days or maybe weeks to do in the standard Oracle development
tools. There was one report I did in Access that I did in maybe an
hour. I tweaked it a couple times as the requirements changed over the
course of a couple months, spending probably another couple hours for
4 or so variations. I'm not allowed to deploy my Access creations to
the users so I have to run them when they need them to be run though.
My boss doesn't care for that and wants things developed in tools that
users can run things themselves. This one would take me about 5
minutes to run each time they needed it to be run. So they used my
query results as the specifications for the Oracle Reports based
solution and the guy who did it took two solid weeks to get the first
draft done and then needed another week to fine tune it before the
user would sign off that it gave her what she needed. She really
didn't like the end result but it did give her the numbers she needed
and she could run it herself and she did like that.

I use other tools now - Informatica ETL tool to move data around and
load Data Warehouse tables. Business Objects for reporting. So I have
solutions that I can do the same things I do with Access and they do
work. But they are quite a lot more difficult to achieve the same
results as I do with a little dragging and dropping in the Access
windows.

GK

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Susan Harkins <ssharkins at gmail.com> wrote:
> Gary, I'm in a similar situation -- not working with Access much anymore. I
> haven't moved on to something else, I'm just working less. The dh is retired
> and I'm partially so... I read messages sometimes, but by the time I see
> them, someone else has usually answered them. To be honest, a lot of threads
> get deleted unread. I don't think Access is dead by any means, but I think
> the industry is using it very differently. :( I run polls frequently on my
> Office blog and Access is the least used application and nobody really wants
> to read about it. I still do write about it, just not very often -- once a
> month maybe.
>
> Susan H.
>
>
>
>
> I really wonder how many people we have reading the messages on a
> timely basis. I'm looking at my inbox about every hour during the work
> day. Maybe once a day on weekends though. But I really only open
> messages that have a subject that either interests me or I think I
> might have input on. I do skip entire threads if it seems it's nothing
> I can help with. So much to do, so little time.
>
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-- 
Gary Kjos
garykjos at gmail.com