Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access is used by most of our organization. It is the back end of a medical billing application that our users access for reports, do input and export into other formats for sharing that data with providers and payers of medical billing. I directly access the databases to use data for complex reports that the application cannot provide and to repair the databases when there is a problem.

We have multiple databases within the department. One of them has images that are stored with the data. When working on database management Microsoft Access is the easiest to use and sort out the information for clean-up and export for reporting. If you don't have a lot of time for database management Access makes it faster and easier than Filemaker, or several other interfaces. I like it as much or more so than Excel for larger database information and reporting.

The downside is that people are intimidated by the program.

I am the primary person using Access in my department.

Microsoft Access is used in our department for the reporting that we provide. Access is a great way for us to create a small database for our information. We then have created macros that make updating our reports and numbers very easy. Without Access this process would take much longer.

Currently we use Access in our IT department to manage our various hardware resources. I have used Access in the past to implement a medium sized application for a Logistics company. Access is an excellent tool to both learn and implement database applications. I've often thought that after word processors and spreadsheets that database apps would be the app learned by the majority of computer users. That has not been the case for a variety of reasons, but if it were, Access would set the standard for easy relational database implementation.

It is the back end of an ERP system that we are using at our company. The ERP system keeps track of our inventory, sales orders, production, and invoices.