[hamofgobelgope]

I've been able to make some pretty cool things with Access as the backend, and Excel as the frontend. Add a little VBA/SQL and you're looking like a rockstar. Access and Excel provide a versatile infrastructure to quickly prototype different and effective ways of using/presenting your data.

[ims]

This is a great point too. Excel is hard to lock down and easy for non-computer people to use. Access is easy to lock down and relatively harder to use.

If you know what you're doing, you can use Access (scary program that people don't really know what it's for) to lock down the data and enforce business rules and that kind of thing, then give coworkers Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables from an ODBC connection to the Access db that they can "do their thing" and mess with and email around.

The true worst of both worlds though is when somebody creates an amateur Access db, locks it down so you have to do everything through a 1995-Visual-Basic-looking switchboard, creates horrendous forms with garish colors and giant bitmap images that have no coherent UI... and ... I can't even go on, these are too painful to remember.

[hamofgobelgope]

I honestly would never recommend Access as a user frontend. It's amazing how quickly Access userforms become convoluted and confusing. The only "FE" development I've done with Access is simple database maintenance tools usually only used by the developer(me) or a trained maintainer.

Also, most people are comfortable with Excel. Access userforms can scare the crap out of some users, but they're able to manipulate Excel just fine.

I was able to whip up a tool for my boss where his direct reports could log the time they spend on a particular project each day (ridiculous, I know). It's a simple Excel spreadsheet with Excels built in calendar selector, and two columns: Project and hours. Clicking a button writes to an Access database, which my boss can now pull the data straight into Excel with a couple canned reports. No one ever sees anything but Excel. I get that this may not be ideal but: 1. Took a morning to get to production 2. Quick user uptake because they're already comfortable with the system 3. Gets the job done, and my boss can still mess around with the numbers in excel all he likes

So there are use cases.

Another one that I've used successfully is utilizing Access as a middle-man to join two discrete systems within a corporation by using the Import Linked Table feature and building a join query. This way, Access does the heavy lifting of mashing two separate datasets together, allowing users to understand relationships instead of spending time trying to jam lines of data side-by-side.

This comment got long...sorry.