I still think MS Access was awesome. In the small companies I worked it was used successfully by moderately tech savvy directors and support employees to manage ERP, license generation, invoices, etc.

The most heard gripe was the concurrent access to the database file but I think that was solved by backing the forms by accessing anything over odbc.

It looked terrible but also was highly functional.

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RobinL 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Agreed! The first piece of software I built was a simple inventory and sales management system, around 2000. I was 16 and it was just about my first experience programming.

It was for school, and I recently found the write up and was surprised how well the system worked.

Ever since I've marvelled at how easy it was to build something highly functional that could incorporate complex business logic, and wished there was a more modern equivalent.

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spockz 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe a combination of AirTable and PowerBI/open-source alternative? Or just ms access backed by a proper database?

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jon-wood 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Grist[1] is great for this stuff, at first glance its a spreadsheet but that spreadsheet is backed by a SQLite database and you can put an actual UI on top of it without leaving the tool, or you can write full blown plugins in Javascript and HTML if you need to go further than that.

[1] https://www.getgrist.com/

	▲	viraptor 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just another yay for Grist here! I've been looking for an Access alternative for quite a while and nothing really comes close. You can try hacking it together with various BI tools, but nothing really feels as accessible as the original Access. While it's not a 1:1 mapping and the graphical report building is not really there, you can still achieve what you need. It's like Access 2.0 to me.

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fsagx 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Access as a front end for mssqlserver ran great in a small shop. Seems like there was a wizard that imported the the access tables easily into sqlserver.

I've not seen anything as easy to use as the Access visual query builder and drag-n-drop report builder thing.