Microsoft Access is a database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools.
The Salesforce Platform is designed for building and deploying scalable cloud applications with managed hardware provisioning and app stacks. Lightning Web Components are used by developers to build reusable UI components.
As a Material Purchasing/Planning/inventory tracking application, Microsoft Access serves its purpose well. It's presentation is clean, data entry is simple and the ability to customize search fields is welcome. It does, however, come with some caveats; namely, when setting search filters and the need arises to back up a step or two, with Microsoft Access you have to reset, or "clear all", adding extra steps/time to a query.
If you have a large customer base and a large amount of data on each of your customers, it is really strong in creating personalized content that your salespeople can use in their pitch meetings—and then setting up workflows for automated for lifecycle journey creations to automatically go out to customers.
Microsoft Access has not really changed at all for several years. It might be nice to see some upgrades and changes.
The help info is often not helpful. Need more tutorials for Microsoft Access to show how to do specific things.
Be careful naming objects such as tables, forms, etc. Names that are too long can get cut off in dialog boxes to choose a table, form, report, etc. So, I wish they would have resizable dialog boxes to allow you to see objects with long names.
I wish it could show me objects that are not in use in the database for current queries, tables, reports, forms, and macros. That way unused objects can be deleted without worrying about losing a report or query because you deleted the underlying object.
I and the rest of my team will renew our Microsoft Access in the future because we use and maintain many different applications and databases created using Microsoft Access so we will need to maintain them in the future. Additionally, it is a standard at our place of work so it is at $0 cost to us to use. Another reason for renewing Microsoft Access is that we just don' t have the resources needed to extend into a network of users so we need to remain a single-desktop application at this time.
Microsoft Access is easy to use. It is compatible with spreadsheets. It is a very good data management tool. There is scope to save a large amount of data in one place. For using this database, one does not need much training, can be shared among multiple users. This database has to sort and filtering features which seem to be very useful.
It's very good, but it's still living in a little bit in an older design aspect, but I think a lot of it is about to come out, just hasn't quite gotten there yet. Still a little clunky from a you have to know it to know it or you know it to use it. It takes a little bit of training to get into it. It's not quite the, anybody can come in and start using it immediately, type feel.
While I have never contacted Microsoft directly for product support, for some reason there's a real prejudice against MS Access among most IT support professionals. They are usually discouraging when it comes to using MS Access. Most of this is due to their lack of understanding of MS Access and how it can improve one's productivity. If Microsoft invested more resources towards enhancing and promoting the use of MS Access then maybe things would be different.
I am not an administrator so there may very well be outstanding Support and I am just not privy to it. On a user level it's hard to gauge the effectiveness and responsiveness of Support because nearly everything has to go through an administrator
Excel is a fantastic - robust application that can do so much so easily. Its easy to train and understand. However - excel does not provide a reporting function and that is typically where we will suggest a move to [Microsoft] Access. [Microsoft] Access requires a little more knowledge of data manipulation.
We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. Certain reps were chosen to experiment with it and from there a decision was made to move forward. We've been customers ever since.
