News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?. Parent comment

Re:Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a gr... by aaronschroeder on Thursday March 31, 2022 @06:02PM (#30872701)
Access was pretty incredible for what it is/was. I could build a structured database with a nice UI for non-data people, reports, and even more advanced things like automated emails, exports, etc., in 1/10th or even 1/20th the time it'd take to build something similar as a web app.

We had an Access database that managed grant funding for an entire public University and in many ways it worked a lot better than the SaaS app that recently replaced it. Need to collect a new set of data? No problem, give me 4 hours and it'll be ready to use :P.

I'd love to have something like Access but that worked very well as a platform-agnostic web app and could easily integrate with cloud infrastructure.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a gr... by fragmede on Thursday March 31, 2022 @08:04PM (#30873693)
You used to be able to do that with Access 2010 web databases. Of course, Microsoft has deprecated that in favor of Powerapps and Microsoft Dataverse, but it's not clear that actually lets you join an Access database to a low-code frontend. (It should, but there's a lot of marketing speak that I don't quite understand.)
[ Parent | on HN ]