It just means the person who is at a level higher than the normal user and is not a developer. Like the accountant who does up his own databases for himself or his group..
Many, many of us here on the forum make a living creating commercial apps using Access that are sold at competitive prices because Access is great for Rapid Application Development. Staff working for big companies who need ad-hoc data storage and reporting is just a different niche than the rest of us. It looks like the latter group is being catered to while the rest of us are getting stiffed.
And while they (MS) thinks that they are helping them, what they are really doing is enabling bad practices (in lots of situations) and then they (the Power IW's) come to us for how to fix their problems. And we do so much FREE "fixing" of Microsofts failure to make their programs so that they use best practices but they don't seem to give a rats @SS about what we think. That's why I'm so PO'd at them. The damn Power IW's come here for help and we help them but to help us is not "cost-effective" according to "their research."
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That opens a whole new topic.
Access is a funny animal in the sense that it's easy for do-it-yourselfers can make a CD collection more easily than learning C#.NET and SQL Server. But the danger in that is when simple users (like your friend the accountant you referenced) think that their ability means that they can make a full-scale application but when the latter bombs, then Access is viewed as a toy because it's Access, not them.
If you look at the myriad posts on this forum, many people who are just starting in Access don't understand the essentials of data normalization. It's wonderful that the forum members can provide guidance and many people learn that way, but what about the millions who don't bother and think that it's Access?
In my opinion, Access should disallow bad practices that will come back to haunt such as:
- using reserved words in naming. Is it THAT difficult to program a warning when the user creates a table that says something like "'Date' is not a valid field name as it is a reserved word". If newbies can make databases then they have to have appropriate warnings and prevention.
- Sharing a database without splitting. How many poor souls just thought that it's easy enough to create a shortcut and share one database with 5 users and then say "Access corrupts all the time" because they didn't understand that it has to be split.
Just to conclude: if you're going to make a tool that newbies can use, then it has to be able to have a lot more newbie-habit prevention or it's going to cause a lot of grief down the road.
SHADOW
