Microsoft Access Summary
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Access
Microsoft Access is used as a tool to fulfill the role of a back-end relational database when one is needed. Access is available enterprise-wide as it is available in the Microsoft Office bundle, but it is used more heavily by the data and analytics departments. We use it for things such as accounting systems, customer transaction tracking, and high volume data processing. Access serves as a more powerful database than Microsoft Excel or traditional client-server based databases and has capabilities for migration that make it useful.
Pros
- Access has a simple user interface and is intuitive enough for more people to use without much confusion. While this may seem to imply that it has fewer functionalities than other software, that is not true.
- Good performance for small personal applications. For example, when reporting about a small company, its performance is great.
- Access is a popular program which means more people have knowledge of it and it is included on the expectation of most people hired for data positions.
Cons
- Access has slow performance when dealing with tens and hundreds of thousands of records. As an enterprise we have millions of customers and assets and Access doesn't seem to be equipped to handle such volumes.
- Access is not really ideal for bigger companies because of limited space and allowed number of users
- It saves time in processing small sets of important data which helps us make critical business decisions quickly.
- UI can be used by anyone so you don't need a trained individual to query data.
- When size of data is nearing limits of the program, it can cause problems last minute.
I would prefer MySQL for larger data sets, but Microsoft Access is all around better than Apache OpenOffice.
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