Just back from the UK Access User Group Seminar where I did a talk on User Login and Security. The simple Access demo I used and the accompanying notes can be downloaded and used freely from the Links page. Microsoft Access is a hidden gem. Many professional programmers who mainly use Visual Studio have no idea how powerful it is. With SQL Server as a backend you have the power to handle millions of transactions and dozens of users but the native Access database engine is very capable of handling smaller systems. Certainly it is a very rapid development tool but with the power of Visual Basic for Applications there’s very little it cannot handle. Now with Access Web Apps, it is going into the world of browsers and handheld devices and Access 2016 is on the way so hopefully the product will be around for many more years…if only more schools used it to teach database development.

For more details of the UK Access User Group see www.ukaug.co.uk