How many access licences required?

[mburrows]

Hi

I'm thinking about spending some time learning to use Access and link it to models in Excel, for work. However, we do not currently have any Access licences.

I am going to be the only person that will be building the database/models, and other users will (ideally) only interact with the Excel part, ie inputting data and testing the model.

My question is: am I the only person that needs an actual Access licence, and others will only have excel interacting with access in the background through VBA? Or does everyone need to have access installed on their machines?

Thanks!

 

[RoryA]

To the best of my knowledge you only need a licence if you actually have Access. Interacting through the database engine does not require an Access licence.

 

[xenou]

That was also what I thought.

 

[ScottR]

Hi

I'm thinking about spending some time learning to use Access and link it to models in Excel, for work. However, we do not currently have any Access licences.

My advice would be - don't bother. MS have made it pretty clear that Access exists only as a legacy product. The basic version express version of SQL Server is free and it a better database (stored procedures, triggers etc).

Everything that is better about Access, you can learn through or reproduce in Excel (eg rapid creation of a user interface to support use of the database).

The historical advantage that everyone with a version of Office would have it installed (and that reason obviously no longer exists) was probably the last good reason to use it for small projects.

All in my not at all humble opinion...

 

[xenou]

Wow!

 

[ScottR]

It's not that big a wow though, is it? Even some of the most ardent access supporters lost their nut at the announcement that AWAs were being dropped.

The writing is on the wall (and I don't care if people have been saying this for two decades, I wasn't one of them).

SQL Server Express - an actual scalable database is free (as well as a plethora of open source options, many of which are also scalable and more stable). You can hit performance issues with more than one concurrent user in Access. That's crazy.
Lots of businesses now use versions of office without Access (I'm a contractor and this has been noticable to me) so it is not going to be a default choice as it has been in the past.
Lots of new open source databases have overtaken Access in popularity (personally glad I went down the MySQL, PHP route years ago given the lack of growth in that area).
Growing drive towards (awareness of) the importance of information security (both data integrity and system security) and enterprise level accessibility of business data.
Lots of cross platform presentation layers are replacing the traditional advantages that came with the rapid front end development.

Access was/is a great rapid development tool. But its actual business use will remain confined to small scale single analyst specialisms where data security is a low priority and Access experts will spend the rest of their careers migrating databases to more robust platforms.... of course there'll be no shortage of work for them for a long time.

 

[xenou]

I've always assumed it's pretty obvious that SQL Server Express and other databases are a viable alternative and clearly better if you need concurrency or security (or better performance, if that's an issue).

Other than that, I don't think the writing is on the wall (and if it has been on the wall for 20 years then it definitely has been wrong for a long time, if not a long time to come). In short, I don't see any reason not to use Access if it suits your needs. But clearly if you don't have it you won't be using it and if MS wants to phase it out that's going to decide it's fate. I don't know of any actual decision by Microsoft to discontinue MSAccess - if you have supporting docs for that I'd be interested.

Note - not sure what an AWA is. I'm not an Access expert in any professional sense so I really don't care about most of this other than the implication that no one should even bother with Access - I just wouldn't go that far (yet) - well, actually I do care insofar as I'd be sad to see it go as I got a huge amount of useful work done with Access and also enjoyed working with it greatly.