I am please to be able to report that Access’ new Program Manager, Ebo Quansah, formally told us today in an online meeting that there will be another release of the Perpetual Licensed version of Microsoft Access in 2022! Access lives on! So, the next person that tells you Access is dead, you can flat out tell them they have heard incorrectly.
As far as what is coming down the road for Access, Microsoft is being tight-lipped (nothing new there), but he did affirm Microsoft’s commitment to developing Access further. Let’s keep our fingers crossed we see some useful upgrades coming our way in the not too distant future. I know, you think I’m dreaming again, but you have to hold out hope that Microsoft will eventually listen to their end-users and developers and address Access’ true needs (update the VBE – Visual Basic Editor, QBE – Query By Example, Relationship window, and do much more). They need to get back to basics, bring those things into the 21st century before focusing on other bells and whistles.
Ebo also seemed to be suggesting we invest in learning PowerApps, I felt it was a ‘read between the lines’ type of comment, but that was my impression. But I do know that MS is pushing PowerApps very hard, so who knows how it will factor into Access’ future. Since we still don’t have a viable Web/Cloud version of Access, PowerApps and Flow are MS current offerings.
I also found one piece of data provided by Ebo to be interesting/informative. He had a slide which highlighted the fact that Microsoft Access is used within 95% of Fortune 500 companies. So that should provide any needed credibility when discussing Microsoft Access as an Enterprise level solution.
AMEN
Microsoft Access is my life, a tool which not only supports me but also helps in lay down the food on my dining table everyday for my family.
I’m using Access ever since it was born and I have grown with it. There are too many features which Access needs to have and the major feature required today and tommorrow is having the database on a Cloud Or some solutions to make it run on the Cloud.
I would suggest Microsoft to develop a New Model for Access if they really need to push it to make Access work on the Cloud. We are ready to change along with the New Model a new backend structure, everything & anything BUT PLEASE DO SOMETHING TO MAKE ACCESS RUN ON THE CLOUD.
There are millions of Access users (I’m not exaggerating here), who use Access in daily life (Even if they have SAP or any other ERP implemented in their organization).
These million users are also looking different ways to host their Access applications so they can be used as Federated solutions, but they are facing hurdles in terms of High connectivity costs and maintenance issues.
My request to Microsoft Access Team is to develop a New Access Model which is designed for the Cloud and if possible bring back ADP’s.
Please try and make Access programs run in a Web Browser this will cut down Licensing problems and if a Mac Version is released we Access Developers can take Access application solutions to a new level.
Thank you Microsoft Access Team for developing such a Great Product.
We Access users love you.
Waiting anxiously for the New Version.
Sadly, I doubt we are going to see any real push to the web. Microsoft has made 3-4 attempts now (Data Access Pages, Web Databases, Web Apps), and failed on all counts, so I’d be pleasantly surprised to see them take another swing at things! I also have a feeling it would require such a rewrite of the base product that it would be a colossal undertaking and with the limited investment we’ve seen in the product in the past decade, I just don’t see it happening. Then there’s also the fact that MS is heavily investing in PowerApps and Flow, so would they then invest in an Access ‘web tool’ in parallel?
On the ADP front, I can state that it was brought to Ebo’s attention.
All we can do is hope for the best.
I use Access since 2000 and it has developed my career till now.
Definitely agree with you, Access needs cloud support to make it future-proof.
Please Microsoft don’t kill this good software Access.
Access as a frontend and SQL Server as the data backend works great on the cloud. Even the free version of SQL Server is robust for a small group of users using Access as the front end. I started using this system in 2001 back in the “dial-up” internet days and performance was great. Once we got a dedicated T1 line, lightning fast with 100 users. I started out with linked OBDC tables to SQL Server and it was like Access on steroids. I then switched to managing data via Access using stored procedures for better performance and security.
Access is amazing if you need rapid development and SQL Server is powerful for great cloud performance.
I disagree that Access needs to “run in the cloud”. That is the mistake MS made with the last four attempts. To make Access “run in the cloud” requires a new product that is no longer Access as we know it. That is one of the reasons that AWA failed. Current users don’t want to rewrite their entire applications. They simply want to swap out the BE. All of my apps are created so I can swap the ACE BE for any other RDBMS that supports ODBC so I can upsize my apps in less than an hour in most cases. Basically, just the time it takes to port the data and get it all linked up and tested again. Access relies on ODBC to make the BE as transparent as possible. It’s not 100% but it is pretty durn close. If my client decides to scrap SQL Server and go with Oracle, my apps will be ready the next day. How many other applications can say that?
What Access does need is smarter ODBC drivers so that data that is hosted in the cloud can be accessed as easily as data hosted on our local LAN. Access is very chatty as anyone who has ever run the monitor that views traffic between SQL Server and Access can attest. So, maybe, the changes have to go beyond the ODBC driver, maybe some of that chatter needs to be tamed to reduce the traffic between Access and the remote database.
Access is a client/server app. It is not a web app nor does it need to be. To satisfy all of my client needs for Access, all I need is the ability to host my data in the cloud and allow the Access client .accdb’s link to it. For applications that require anonymous connections as many web pages do, Access is not the solution and trying to make Access do that as well just makes it’s client/server face change. I belong to the school that believes that not all applications have to be all things to all people which is probably why I don’t like smart phones. I know it is convenient to have a flashlight and a camera in your phone but neither the camera nor the flashlight are very good tools (and actually the phone isn’t either – bring back my flip phone) so what you end up with is a bunch of poor tools conveniently located in a single place. Access is a special purpose tool. It is EXCELLENT at what it does (there is nothing better on the market) and it doesn’t pretend to be all things to all people. Just let Access be Access and allow it to reach out to “access” web databases and everyone will be happy.
My clients currently use Citrix when they need to support multiple locations. It works, but it is more costly.
” If my client decides to scrap SQL Server and go with Oracle, my apps will be ready the next day. How many other applications can say that?”
Most of us use ORMs (object-relational mappers) in our code nowadays, regardless of language, so the answer is honestly “almost all of them”. If your client decides to scrap Windows and go with Linux, will your apps be ready the next day? That’s where most other users can say “yes” but you’re stuck. You’ve still got vendor lock-in.
“It is EXCELLENT at what it does (there is nothing better on the market) ”
Didn’t you just knock a bunch of poor tools in one place? Access is an ancient dialect of BASIC that Microsoft long ago said they never intend to update combined with a mediocre local database engine, some ancient editors, a 1990’s-Delphi style form designer and a basic report tool. You could install Python for free and get a much more powerful though still easy-to-use language that dominates in the field of data analysis, an ORM to write high-level database-independent object-oriented code, SQLite for extremely fast and reliable local database storage, QT5 for truly enterprise-grade user interfaces and BIRT or another standalone report tool for quality reporting. Of course you can toss in a web framework and target the browser without Sharepoint too. You’d also gain version control support, unit testing and lots of modern development benefits, an interactive “notebook” mode that runs in a browser for interactive data analysis, etc. Total cost: free and both the tools and their output will run on all major OSes. With Python you also have access to over 200,000 (!!!) open source libraries in a package manager. Toss in the professional version of the PyCharm IDE and you get support for Python, Javascript/Typescript and SQL/database management all in one IDE that runs on all OSes. There’s also a free community edition so you still don’t need to spend money. Want to graduate from CRUD forms to machine learning with that data? Python has you covered there too.
Now of course, similar cases could be put forward for R, C# and a few other development languages/environments. The point is that Access is far from being alone in 2019 and the niche it filled, like the one Delphi filled (I used to be a Delphi developer), were 1990s problems. In 2019 there is a new set of problems – and the web is one of them. Like Delphi, Access isn’t prepared to fully support the problems/solutions of 2019. Increasingly, IT wants one app that runs on a server (often Linux) with a web front-end rather than deploying to 200 PCs, and they want it to run on tablets and phones too. Just letting Access be Access won’t cut it here. Heck, MS itself seems to want to move everything into the cloud (potentially even the OS!). Some Delphi users I know who refused to acknowledge the shift found themselves in a very unfavorable position. If Microsoft won’t adapt Access, users might need to consider whether it is time for them to adapt and change instead.
I have a question about the cloud, so is it possible to have SQL data in the cloud and have it connect to Access through an ODBC or is it not? I read through the article and comments several times but can’t really tell if that is what is being said…
Help me out. Please.
You can use say Azure to house your back-end data and connect with your FE. That said, you will take a performance hit and you should ideally start development with this approach in mind from the start. Optimize all your forms to only pull specific records rather that pulling a whole table, etc…
So I normally would recommend it for existing databases unless you are going to take the time to address every form within your db.
I completely agree with Patricia Hartman. Only additional point I’d make is, use the OLEDB driver for faster access to web data (and hey, on-LAN data too), especially for read-only results such as combo boxes and list boxes. I don’t know how much chatter there is, but performance is much better than via linked tables (always ODBC).
“He had a slide which highlighted the fact that Microsoft Access is used within 95% of Fortune 500 companies. So that should provide any needed credibility when discussing Microsoft Access as an Enterprise level solution.”
There’s a flaw to that argument. You’re assuming that those Fortune 500 companies’ IT departments are happy that Access is being used. You’re also assuming Access is used for “enterprise-level solutions”. In my experience at a billion-dollar U.S. retailer’s corporate HQ, the IT department flat-out refused to support any Microsoft Access applications. Access was also being used by certain department directors as a way to make an end-run around the IT department (which I’m sure contributed to IT refusing to support Access in turn). Access was being used by people to produce ad-hoc apps to support one or two users and which were completely undocumented either in the source code or via internal documentation (sadly, I inherited one of these when I was hired). This program was supposed to reconcile shipping bills with purchase orders but was so poor/unmaintained that another employee spent half a day once every two weeks manually sorting through the 2000 unmatched bills this program would spit out and manually reconciling them (yes, about 98% were falsely rejected). It was hard to blame anyone when even the department’s Access guru would often insist “I’m NOT a programmer!” when people would float Access project ideas to him. In my case, I made the mistake of beginning my first project assignment by wanting to do a study of what the best tools were for the task. That’s when I was told “We have Access, so we’ll just do it in Access. N*** always does it in Access” (of course, that’s because N*** wasn’t a programmer and had never used anything else). Basically, we used Access because we didn’t have to get a purchase order approved or get IT to install anything for us (we tried once, three weeks went by, and they ultimately declined to allow it).
Similarly, I know some large companies that technically still use Delphi, but it’s to maintain one ’90s-era program sitting on a PC that’s too large and/or too undocumented to consider a rewrite for. That usage doesn’t consist of an endorsement of Delphi either (e.g. doing all new development in C#).
To make the case for Access at the enterprise level in the future will require a compelling argument from Microsoft, not a mere statistic.
“You’re assuming that those Fortune 500 companies’ IT departments are happy that Access is being used.”
Them being happy, or not, is inconsequential to the fact that it IS being used that much.
Typically, IT isn’t happy with Access, most of this is due to them not understanding Access (how to properly set it up) and not being able to control it.
That said, I fully agree, it is on Microsoft to actually promote their product properly, something they have lacked for 20+ years!
There are tons of things to fix in Access 2013. I was hoping they will do it with the 2016 version, but no. Just seven cosmetic changes (bigger browse dialog, wow, new theme, wow, new colors of the interface, wow…).
Then come 365 aka 2019 and there were even less cosmetic changes. They are selling 2013 under different names only. It will be fair to have “Office 2016 with Access 2013” and “Office 365 with Access 2013” on a label. At least. Just as in the first version of Office when Excel 3.0, Word 5.0 and Access 2.1 got the same version number (if I remember correctly).
Hopefully, they will make something until the next version. There are just so many flaws in the existing version… no need to make anything new, just to fix issues.
And Access WAS DEAD between 2013 and 2022 if we are to believe this gentleman (Ebo). Since I make my life possible working with MS Access I am holding fingers crossed.
This is rather disheartening. I like working with Access and make my living designing DBs in it. However, more and more people want their DBs to be in the cloud. It’s true that you can’t make the application all things to all people, but the scope of projects that we can do, and thus the customers we can get, is becoming more and more limited.
So, if Access is going to vanish soon, what should I migrate to?
What are the things I should learn in order to make a database as good as current Access database, in terms of data storage and forms and queries front ends?
Thanks for the feedback and info.
Access isn’t going away any time soon, so don’t worry.
That said, considering all the issues we’ve been experiencing, the fact that it can’t run on WAN, shared online drives, isn’t web capable, doesn’t run on mobile devices/MACs/…, is this the best app to offer clients? That’s the real question today! Go back 10-20 years Access was exceptional, innovated, … untouchable!!! Nothing was even a close 2nd place runner up. That said, in 30 years, Microsoft truly hasn’t moved the product forward very much while the competition has drastically moved forward, and more importantly listened to the users to provide them with what they want/need (something Microsoft continuously does not do in the least!!!). So you have to evaluate for yourself, your clients’ needs and decide if Access is truly in their best interest and if it serves you as a developer to continue investing in the product.
Thanks Daneil good point and advise.
I now starting to learn MySQL. Hopefully my knowledge in Access can be used a littel bit for this MySQL learning.