Office 2000 Premium Part III: Access, PowerPoint and the Small Business Tools Access, the Quick and Easy Database Douglas Smith
Access 2000, like some of the others in the Office 2000 suite, has an abundance of new features which show that feedback from users has found its way into the ivory low-rises in Washington state. Access 2000 was first introduced in 1992 by Microsoft and has grown in popularity since then by millions of user world wide. With Access 2000 users can create, edit, and manipulate data in just about any fashion that they like. Ease of use is the strongest attribute here, allowing a novice or database veteran to create programs to access and track data very easily. Integration with other components of Office is also a real plus for users of Access 2000.
If you are new to Access you will appreciate how tightly integrated this program is with other programs included with Office 2000 Premium, and you will find that you will be up and running fast because of the familiar look and feel of Office. Power Users will also find the scalability of Access 2000 and the stronger integration to enterprise level databases to be a godsend! Whether you are creating stand-alone or large departmental databases, sharing and managing is a snap.
New features in Access 2000 include easy conversion to prior Access versions, a new database window, name auto-correct, conditional formatting, sub-datasheets, drag and drop to Excel files, form enhancements, print relationships, control grouping, the ability to compact data on exit, and data access pages, which extend database applications to the corporate intranet by creating data-bound HTML pages. Among the Web-Enabled features you can now view and manage related information through the use of hierarchical format, and a toolbox is now provided in the Data Access Page design environment for creating controls very easily. There is a new Field List allowing users to add information to a Data Access Page simply by dragging and dropping the names from this list, and with Shared Components the whole office can use the same components. Rounding out the new features are the new tools for project analysis, support for OLE DB (which allows users to support the scalability of back-end enterprise databases), and of course, what would a Microsoft product be without Wizards? The new Microsoft Access Project Wizard is included to make creating databases, reports, and forms a snap for the novice user. There are visual improvements making it a great addition to Microsoft Office Premium.
The Good and the Bad Like the new additions in most of the Office package we especially like what we see with HTML support and Web based integration. One real nice feature was the integration with SQL backends, this helps to create front ends that handle large interoffice SQL databases. As we mentioned in an earlier part of this of Office 2000 Premium review series, the world seems to be heading in Web based direction, and Access 2000 is not to be left behind in this area. The newly added Wizards have also enhanced this package immensely, when compared to how earlier versions worked in the past. Working with databases is an art when you consider relationships and data keys which keep it all together, but what Microsoft has done is make the whole thing easier for the novice especially but not forgetting the seasoned veteran.
The Conditional Formatting was another nice addition in Access 2000. Negative and positive numbers or values that can be formatted as less than or greater than can now be style-formatted with colors and fonts.
We still feel that corruption with Access databases is a problem that just doesn't seem to go away. And even though it is rather easy to correct a corrupt database in Access, using large multi-user databases in an office and having users either getting kicked off of the network or quitting Access prematurely causes problems for other users. Many of your other major players in this field such as TopSpeed, Clarion, and others utilize a different strategy of opening and closing databases that won't corrupt the data as easily should a problem arise. Until something is done to correct this problem, database administrators are still hesitant in using Access for critical projects.
How Does It All Stack Up? Access 2000 is a strong contender in ease of use, and integration with other programs in the Office Suite. Looks and feel are great along with usability among both novice and advanced users is superb. Using Access 2000 for a front end for larger OLE DB programs should be fine as long as you don't have a large number of users, causing corruption of data. We don't feel that Access is a good choice for handling large corporate databases with many users on a daily basis. Some of Access 2000's rivals are TopSpeed's Clarion Professional Developer, Oracle/SQL, and Database V. In a hands down comparison, Access still lacks some of the powerful features that the others have in database management, stability and program integration. But with its ease of use and seamless integration with all of the other components of Office 2000 you just can't find a better tool for small jobs or just quick and dirty data manipulation.
