[AccessD] Should Business use Access?

Ok, a couple of questions that may be of interest to others as well (you or
Arthur).   These are areas where I feel Access falls short or does really
well as a development tool:

1. Ability to use 3rd party DLL's and controls; are you limited to what is
natively provided?  If so, is what is native sufficient?  Was there anything
lacking that you wanted?

2. Can you call the windows API?

3. Does it compile into a standalone Exe or the equivalent.  In other words,
is it as sensitive as Access is to it's environment (I'm talking VBA and
broken references, bad Office install, etc)?

4. Do you have the ability to debug at runtime on the fly?

5. Is it possible to do a 3 tier design without resorting to another tool?

6. Do you as a developer, have full control over the all the windows it
presents.   With Access, you have good control of everything except the main
Access window.

7. Does it have the ability to connect to a wide range of data sources like
Access?   I.e. can I read an Excel spreadsheet directly as a table?
Import/Export data easily?

8. Does it support OLE automation?  Can I still send mail through Outlook?

  I think those would be all of the biggies for most of us.

  I don't see converting as a nuisance.  That's likely moving from any
product to any another product.  In my experience, data moves OK but just
about everything else never does.   It doesn't bother me either that it
doesn't use a database container, but certainly there is a loss of
convenience there.

Jim. 

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Hewson
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2014 09:45 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] Should Business use Access?

I thought I would tell you about my experience with Alpha v11 (A11). Alpha
Anywhere (AA) is v12.  First, some background.  I'm an independent
contractor for the federal government, specifically for the Army Research
Laboratory.  My work began with them six years ago - I've been working on
the same project the entire time using Access exclusively. The project I'm
working on is complex... 72 tables, 555 queries, 169 forms, 156 reports and
about 50 UDFs.

<<snip>>