Average Rating: 
Rating: - An excellant desktop product for data collection and review
Have only used Microsoft Access 2000 Office version and would be interested in acquiring MS Access 97 or 2000 for home use.
Rating: - Great Windows product; many ease of use enhancements.
Let's face it: as a cross-platform tool or large system database Access won't cut it as it comes out of the box, but if you are looking for something to create a pretty cool application for a windows platform, Access can't be beat. The database is flawless, string manipulation is easy, and designing the GUI is a breeze if you have done your up-front work (like giving the fields a meaningful text description). The latest version, Access 2002 comes with improved wizards that are actually helpful. I created a small application in a day with just this product and the help text. It did not require much code (4 navigation macros that anyone with basic programing skills could write). We also flawlessly moved this application to a Windows 2000 server running IIS for an intranet. Don't expect the best response time from Access 2002. A web query through what is called a "data access" page takes about 30 seconds on a 200,000 record file on a server with half a gig of memory and no other applications running. Some of the other ease of use enhancements are better button control and improved macro coding, easier navigation throughout the product and improved help text with step by step procedures on how to create specific examples.
Rating: - Improved Application
Improves PivotTable and PivotChart support; adds multilevel undo and redo in Data Access Page; increases keyboard shortcuts; provides better support for multilingual databases. In Access 2002, Microsoft has updated the file format yet again, sure to causee graning among the Access 97 faithful. But Access 2002 can open and modify Access 2000 databases without applying the new file format, which is a small concession at best. Access 2002 interacts with the new SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (formerly MSDE) for creating more scalable apllications and supports two-way XML support.
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