Forum Discussion
Has Microsoft forsaken Access? (by an "amatuer" Access developer)
In some ways, you are preaching to the choir. No one I interact with professionally thinks Access gets sufficient respect.
Northwind Starter Edition and Northwind Developer Edition were created specifically to present design and functionality concepts in a manner that is tailored to the varying perspectives of different categories of end users. Having been part of the volunteer team that created these templates, I can attest to the amount of work it takes to create templates of even modest complexity.
Creating other templates for other business models would be possible, of course. The problem is that there is an endless variety of businesses, though, from retail operations, to manufacturing, to legal offices, to testing labs, craft breweries, small contractors, and on and on. And among those operations, there is an equally infinite variety of business practices, so that any given template would inevitably leave many, perhaps most, unsatisfied. Microsoft provides tools for creating custom database applications, not turn-key database applications.
My experience with Forms is, admittedly, limited. I found the interface to be quite narrowly focused on one kind of task, which is described on their web site this way:
"Microsoft Forms is a web-based application that lets you design and analyze online forms, surveys, quizzes, and polls. You can integrate it with other Microsoft 365 apps, use various question types and themes, and access your forms from anywhere."
Surveys, quizzes and polls.
That's a fairly narrow focus, I think. If capturing the input from a Microsoft form into an Excel spreadsheet is not sufficient, then perhaps there are better ways to gather the data. Especially given that the path is one-way: Forms --> Spreadsheet --> Relational Database.
I might focus on optimizing that data migration path, such as it is. Or I might look for other ways to gather the kind of data that is the main focus of the Forms tools.
It occurred to me after posting before that this problem is really not about how Access fits in the current marketplace. That hasn't changed much over the years. What has changed is the increased availability of alternatives to the traditional desktop relational database application. Specifically, we are primarily looking at browser-based tools and infrastructure. Forms fits in that category. Access does not.
On the other hand, Access has always stood out because of its ability to link to, and consume, data from a broad range of sources, from tables in an mdb/accdb to SQL Azure to Excel files and even text files. Recently Dataverse (previously known as CDS or Common Data Service) was added. There is a path, therefore, for data into and out of an Access relational database application from a wide variety of sources.
The problem here is not a limitation or shortcoming in Access. The problem is that Forms was designed to be a browser based tool, not a desktop tool. The data itself not stored in "Forms", by the way, although I don't know how and where it is stored. I suspect it might be in Dataverse, but that's just me reading the tea leaves.
The question is whether the return on that investment would justify the effort to enable that linkage easily for end users. If, as I suspect, the data is in Dataverse, then it would be highly possible to link an Access FE to those Dataverse tables. Again, I have nothing other than a couple inferences and suggestions to that effect. I don't even know where to go to confirm that. It's worth a bit of investigation, though.