[perl4ever]

"So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work"

I don't know why you think a lot of VBA would be replaced by a little perl. Of course, my perspective has a lot to do with the fact that it was essentially impossible to get a new perl module installed where I used to work.

But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" is telling.

Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match precisely.

And often IT types like to exercise power by gatekeeping - if you aren't doing "real" programming, you don't need a Turing complete solution, so Office ends up being the only option. I've been told that if I can select a list of columns from a dataset, and some filters, by pointing and clicking, that's all I, or my managers, need for reports.

Honestly, I think a lot of people find fulfillment in their work through being the person who can say "no" to people, particularly managers that are theoretically higher ranking. And also by expressing themselves through creative decisions when others fail to specify details. I think that using Office/Access/VBA may be correlated to rejecting the value system of most developers, rather than a technical judgment.

[flukus]

> But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" is telling.

We're talking access here, at best it's ugly and at worst you've got a gaudy background image(1) and a color scheme that would give the disability compliance officer a stroke. Throwing in bootstrap or a more minimal css framework is a huge step up in terms of presentation.

> Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match precisely.

I'm thinking of scenarios a bit more complex than that. Access apps generally have a few data input screens, multiple users, etc. Not complicated but not as simple as reports.

I'll admit that I do run away from anything to do with reports, but usually that's because they've installed some "easy to use, no developers required" reporting system that the non-developers can't use and makes life 10 times harder for the developers. If I can just write sql to shove data into an html table or excel template (where we can have the best of both worlds) I'm more than happy too.

1. I actually think of some of these old access programs when I look at windows new built in mail app, who the hell adds a background image?

[perl4ever]

"We're talking access here, at best it's ugly and at worst you've got a gaudy background image(1) and a color scheme that would give the disability compliance officer a stroke. Throwing in bootstrap or a more minimal css framework is a huge step up in terms of presentation."

I'm talking about creating Excel reports based on pulling stuff from (possibly a random assortment of) databases. Where you can use any feature of Excel. Not that the Access application is distributed to people who care what it looks like.

It seems like you can't even imagine a complex report that isn't an interactive application. So I think we're just talking different languages.

Honestly, I was just talking to someone in the organization I work in with the same lack of understanding. He was like "you have a point and click interface that lets you choose some columns from a table and some filters using simple boolean criteria, what else could you (or your manager) want?"

I want the ability to define all the business rules to produce the formatting and munge the data, I guess. And to structure the code in such a way that it's flexible enough to handle major changes. I need regular expressions. I need to run a diff algorithm on text. I need to use XML and REST to talk to SharePoint. I need to scrape information from a system that I only have access to through a web browser.

Basically, I'm using Access/Excel to do what I used to use Qlikview for, or just plain Perl, and it seems to be less of an "impedance mismatch" as people like to say. Also it doesn't cost as much as a car as Qlik licenses did.