Access 2007 is a pain!

[Jim Hess]

I realize from the very beginning that anything I say here will have no
impact on anything or anyone, and will not bring about any change whatsoever.
But I am so frustrated with Access 2007.

I have an Access application that has been running now for nine years. It
has 13 tables, 100 queries, 60 forms, and 40 reports. I took special care to
create the program so that the users didn't have to concern themselves with
how to run a database. They are business office personnel who are concerned
about tracking requisitions and travel authorizations and payroll
information. So I created a lot of custom menus and specialized toolbars,
etc. to make things as user friendly as I possibly could.

The application is a "living" thing that changes as time goes on. The good
news about Access 2007 is that the application will actually run unmodified.
The bad news is that I don't have any way to work with my custom menus and
toolbars, and in my opinion the report writer is not nearly as flexible as it
was in previous versions of Access. Some of my reports are built on queries
that are comprised of six other queries. And my experience so far is that
this new report writer doesn't give me the freedom to design a report the way
I am accustomed to doing so. Some of the books that I have read in the past
suggested that I use the report wizard to create the basic report and then
modify as required. Well, the modification process is a nightmare in Access
2007.

Some of the tutorials I've been watching on Lynda.com have suggested that,
with the new navigation panel, switchboards and menus and toolbars are no
longer really necessary. Well, can you imagine what the navigation panel
looks like on this application? I'm having a difficult time navigating as
the developer.

Some of the Microsoft tutorials I have watched said that Access 2007 was
redesigned after "many years" of careful study. It seems to me that they
must have studied carefully see just how difficult they could make the
program. I don't like the user-interface. It might be very nice for a
simple database. But I will not ever consider switching to it for this
application.

Yes, I know. Like it or leave it. I think it's obvious what my choice is
going to be.

 

[Sean Achim]

I agree that there are MANY things I dislike strongly about the interface.
on several of the discussion forums some of the inputs from Microsoft Staff
shows that they have not even understood the basics of the human interface
design standards that have evolved over decades.

The ribbon is pretty, but it forces users to constantly take their hand off
the keyboard to reach for a mouse. What should be a simple shortcut is now
supposedly "only a few mouse clicks away". Nobody seems to have bothered to
time how long it takes to execute a 3 keystroke keyboard shortcut and then
compare that time to a 3 click operation from the ribbon.

That having been said, I have adapted my development style and modified by
applications to Access 2007 and sold it on to clients who have been impressed
by the "fresh office 2007" look and feel, while retaining all of the
functionality they expected from my previous solutions.

My gripe with Access 2007 is not with the product itself, but rather with
the vision and subsequent direction that I sense it is drifting towards.

The Access 2007 vision document (see
http://office.microsoft.com/search/...ID=ya6E2liA5&respos=1&rt=2&pid=CL100570041033)
is a 24 page document that outlines where Access 2007 is going towards.

It would appear that the writer does not come from a strong Access
development background because of the statements made. For example the
statement : "Access does not easily support the development of multi-tiered
or service-oriented application architectures composed of loosely coupled
components, or applications that need to be built and maintained by large
teams of programmers."

and elsewhere: "Applications that must support large populations of users,
or that require very high levels of reliability or security are usually not
good candidates for development in Access"

While these statements are partially true, many developers that have been
working with Access for many years will quickly list a wide range of
solutions to these problems.

After Access 2.0, many of the MCTs training in Access/SQL Server will
remember preaching that we need to steer away from Macros and encourage the
use only of VBA. This is after all the route that Excel, Word, PowerPoint,
Visio, Project, etc, etc, etc... have all gone.

Suddenly in Access 2007 there is a new focus on Macros.

There is a lot to be said for the SharePoint links, but this is a detraction
from tighter integration into SQL Server.

It would appear that the Visual Studio development team within Microsoft are
winning the boardroom battle to have resources directed their way and that
Access is quietly being relegated to a "less than" position.

Several books have been written about Access as an n-tier development
environment. A truckload of papers and presentations have been developed on
how to integrate complete business solutions in an n-tier environment with
Access as the Rapid Application Development environment.

What would have been nice to see would have been the ability to have
multiple relational diagrams saved to the database, possibly even a new ERD
Database Object on par with Tables, Queries, Modules in the way that it has
been implemented in SQL Server.

Also what would have been extremely helpful is support for true T-SQL
statements without the need to delve into DAO so that T-SQL functions such as
CONVERT and others could be used directly in the VBA & Access Query code.

It would have been nice to have an object browser displayed within the query
designer window.

But all of these developments would imply that Access needs to be taken
seriously. All of these developments would pitch it directly against the
Visual Studio dev team and I don't think that this is part of the overall
vision.

So what we are left with is clearly a product that is being seen as a low
end solution. Even VBA is not being nurtured.

If you want a certification in VBA and enterprise class development with
Access as a Front End and SQL Server/MySQL/Oracle as a back end, then you
need to look outside of Microsoft for such certification (and they do exist)

If you want serious discussions on how effectively Access-Programmers can
take Access, then again you need to look to the broader communities where
Access is actively supported.

Even Access 2007 is being reasonably well received there - in spite of the
initial reluctance to accepting Microsoft's adament adherence to the ribbon
and the lack of any support for backward compatibility to enterprise
solutions that have huge investments in the menu bar and customs interfaces.

Yes Jim. I share your frustration and I would love to see one of the senior
Access development team members joining this discussion and extending some
views that help me to believe that there is going to be substantial
development in Access and that they are willing to listen to the very large
community of professional developers that rely on the ability of Access as a
RAD tool.

My fear is that they are going to shrug their shoulders and say that we will
just need to get used to the idea that we should look to their other tools
and that Access is not going to ever compete effectively with Visual Studio
and the other development tools

Sean Achim