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by hamofgobelgope 4820 days ago
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.