[a_cool_username]

An acquaintance of mine is an accountant. He uses it when his spreadsheets get too big/busy/complex. He's not "technical", but he is quite intelligent and is very familiar with Excel, has even written a few VB macros here and there. It's perfect for him. I assume the thousands of people just like him are the answer to your question.

[segfaultbuserr]

Thanks for the story. I can imagine that, as I said

> creating a glorified Excel for some specific office tasks

What I'm interested in is cases of using Access for something other than a specific office task - it seems Access is still used for some serious business in many businesses (pun not intended).

[a_cool_username]

Well, my point is that I think it's entirely possible that the only real use for MS Access is as a glorified Excel spreadsheet. That seems like a fine use case with a pretty significant market share! When you get right down to it, that's all most small businesses that use "real" relational databases do with them, either.

[segfaultbuserr]

Good point.

[frgotmylogin]

My first job out of school was fixing someone's bright idea of writing a few dozen ecommerce websites with Access as a data store. They stored the CC# so it could be run later as a card not present purchase. It was nightmare fuel, this was in ~2006.