Moving Away from MS Access

Brian_Hayes 

I feel ya...I've been in very similar situations, and I'm trying hard NOT to visualize your circumstances too vividly because it makes me cringe and clench to imagine having to again go though those struggles with IT Creatures. Been there, done that, ready to retire early if I have to do it again.

The thing to remember is, people often over-engineer Access apps, and you should resist the urge to go nuts building fancy forms, reports and so on. KISS, as they say. Learn VBA; it really is fairly easy and quite powerful in the right hands, and some VBA skills are sorta transferable to newer, trendier languages like C#. Try to learn TSQL and let the server do as much of the heavy lifting as possible, it's much faster and someday if you do find some other mythical new technology to "get them out of Access" it will probably play nice with SQL Server, so if the server is already doing most of the work, converting should be less painful.

Other than that, all I can say is that I hope you're not too many years away from retirement when you can blissfully forget about all this BS!