Re: why>?

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aaron.kempf@xxxxxxxxx wrote...
....
It isn't easier to make your bull*** reports in Excel.

Reread what I wrote. And learn how to quote below relevant text - it
may lead to greater comprehension (if anything can lead you to greater
comprehension). I didn't say Excel would be good at generating reports.
I impled it'd be better at performing what-if analysis with the results
in a set format, that of pro forma financial statements, which are
relatively free forms and ill-suited to Access's reporting tools. That
is, for me, having used layout features in both Excel and Access, I
prefer Excel for free form layouts. You may prefer Access, but it's
subjective. As for the calculations, yes, Excel is much, much easier to
use for what-if analysis than any DBMS.

And I dont' agree that Excel is on 'soooo many more machines than access'

Try counting. You do know how to count? Or do you need to enter tallies
into a database and run a query?

I put it at 50-70% of corporate desktops include MS Access?

Way too high. Microsoft publishes no stats on sales of its different
versions of Office, so all I have to go on is what I see and what
friends and aquaintances are willing to tell me about their workplaces.
I work in a regional office rather than a home office. There are 6 of
us out of about 200 people in this regional office with Access. There
are 12 other regional offices around the US, and there's no reason to
believe Access is in wider use in any of those offices. As for HO, I
work closely with people in 3 departments, none IT. About half the
people in one of those departments have Access, and only one person in
the other two departments have Access. Just from this sample, skewed as
it may be, that's less than 10% Access deployment. I've been told the
figures are comparable at other financial services companies by people
I used to work with at other companies.

I know several lawyers, and none of their firms use Access. There are
dedicated legal billing systems used at most larger law firms, and
there's no perceived need or use for databases otherwise (because they
also have dedicated cataloging systems). I'll grant that billing and
cataloging systems are essentially databases, but they're specialized
and essentially runtime databases. These lawyers, their associates,
paralegals and secretaries have no database development tools. Nor do
they seem to perceive any need for them. That'd put my own personal
sampling at under 5% Access deployment.

This is anecdotal, but my own experience makes me believe your 50-70%
guess is wildly overstated. I'd be very surprised if Access is on 25%
of business PCs. And that's based on what I've seen in large corporate
environments and what I've been told about medium to large law firms.
Factor in SMBs, noting that Office Small Business Edition doesn't come
with Access, and even 25% seems high.

I just think that you work for a bunch of Oracle IBM fags who spend
their money in the wrong place.

Most businesses realize that it's impractical to try to foist software
development process on all business PC users. Outside of manufacturing
and transportation sectors, most people's jobs are sales or customer
service. Those people may use databases, but they don't build them or
develop for them. And there's no good reason why they should. In
professional fields, law, medicine, accounting, econometrics,
statistics, engineering, most software used is either special purpose
(e.g., law office or doctor's office billing, CAD for engineers) or
very general for ad hoc uses (e.g., word processors and spreadsheets).

There's a relatively small number of business PCs users whose jobs
involve analysing retrospective financial information and/or planning
who'd derive significant benefit from using databases, and I agree that
those people should have Access or other database development tools and
should follow standard software development processes more closely than
other business PC users. But they represent a minority of spread***
users. For the majority of spreadsheets users your ranting is just
noise.

.

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