Nimetic

For sure. Access is disliked by the IT community, and so is Excel. Screw that. I'm a DB professional and have worked with over probably a dozeon companies, half of them international ones. What I say is... ignore the IT high priests and do your stuff.

Major stakeholders will fund IT to get on board later if they need to scale the system to a large user base. Lots of systems though don't have that many users. This web stuff can be overkill.

Anyways... Excel continues to be a corporate mainstay. MS Access I like somewhat less - because it used to freeze up if pointed to an ERP system (or used to with older object models). It's probably not so bad now. For those who don't know what I mean here.... Access can use local tables, but it can also be used as a front end to remote tables living in Oracle,DB2,SQLServer etc. That is where things can (but not necessarily) get nasty if

- there's lots of tables on the remote system (ERP have 10-30thousand), or
- you are going to deal with more than one concurrent user, or
- the remote system is on another site... link speed is critical

Other than that, if you have one-two users. Access can be nice.

Either way. the underlying macro language (Excell/Access) is VB for Applications. This is useful to know because it can also be used with other MS products. ASP (the MS web server) uses VB script. So does windows scripting.

For an engineer out on site - the ability to roll their own DB is important in my view.. Ditto with advanced spreadsheet manipulation (a statistician friend loved it, for matrix manipulation).

Often.. the most important thing here is to get prototypes up. If a large number of users are required... sure, give it to IT and have them upgrade it. Threaten to do something yourself and they might jump eh.