Excel is for amateurs. To properly screw things up, those same amateurs need a copy of Access
- Reference: 1602486914
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/12/who_me/
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Our story comes from an anonymous financial services company where a reader Regomised as "Chris" used to work back in the day.
He ran a branch office, which employed 20 people and was responsible for supplying custom servers, built in-house, to connect customers to the outfit's POS network. The IT team initially consisted of our hero and a PFY, and the duo performed all the duties required to keep the lights on, as well as building servers to order.
It was a delightfully simple system. An order would come in, one of the pair would eyeball the stockroom, collect required hardware, and order in any components that were running low. It all went swimmingly… "until the Operations Manager got involved," explained Chris.
The manager looked at the value of some of the parts ("Ariel 32 DSP Modems and the like") and decided that a stock control application was needed to keep track of everything.
The Been-There-Done-That merchants will be unsurprised to learn that "the cost of upgrading our accounts package with a stock module was deemed too expensive, so the Operations Manager, who thought of himself as a bit of a coding wizard, decided he would build one."
What could possibly go wrong with such an approach?
"His choice of database left a lot to be desired," sighed Chris, "and we ended up with MS Access as the back-end database as he had done a course on it and liked it."
To be fair, Microsoft Access does have its uses. It is, however, not always "the right tool for the job" and has frequently been found rammed into the most distressing of places by over-enthusiastic amateurs delighted to find it in the Office suite.
"The PFY and I waited," said Chris, "with various degrees of trepidation for the new stock database to land."
"Test versions were rolled out and tested, and we reported the catalogue of faults to the ops manager. Most of the faults were related to adding and removing stock."
"Which is pretty vital in a stock system," he understated.
Back and forth the bug reports went, until the Operations Manager finally declared his baby fit for production. The big red button was pushed and…
"From the start it was a train crash," stated Chris.
Every month there were discrepancies between what was in that .mdb file and what was actually on the shelves. Every month the Ops Manager fiddled with the code to fix the errors and would end up breaking something else.
Chris and his PFY eventually tired of the shenanigans and simply performed a variant on month-end stocktaking. Each month the pair would pull up a report of what the app thought was in stock, compare it to the shelves and, where there was excess…
Hide the items under the floor.
"Bigger items like the 4u chassis we used," he added, "were taken up to the plant room on the roof and hidden in there."
Of course they were.
If there was a shortfall, the duo simply hauled things out of hiding to make up the numbers.
The Operations Manager was overjoyed – as far as he was concerned, his magical Access app was now working correctly. He was never told of the physical hack implemented to kick things ticking over.
Presumably up until Chris and the PFY both moved on and the bugs made a mysterious reappearance.
"I still wonder if anybody ever found the untold thousands of pounds worth of kit we had hidden under the floor or in the plant room," mused Chris.
Ever been faced with an over enthusiastic manager with some, but not quite enough, IT skill? Or taken unusual steps to keep the business ticking over in the face of executive incompetence? Share your experiences with an email to [2]Who, Me? ®
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Re: Access
>Access is not part of our default Office install and never will be!
The users will find other ways to Excel with their "databases"...
I've been there with a stock-taking access program... was a bit of a nightmare TBH.
But at least it looked slick and neat... but the gubbins.... *gibbers*
Using a computer where pen and paper would have sufficed!
When the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Step away from the keyboard, step away....
Re: Using a computer where pen and paper would have sufficed!
On the other hand, if you (think) you know how to make Access databases, then knowing that you'd be waiting for 18 months for something you can knock up in a day or so would be very frustrating...
I've had to clear up the mess of scientists' crashed Access DBs before, I'm not seriously advocating the above, just empathising...
Managers need to appear to have a purpose, especially when they don't.
Yes, most of them are that way, and can generally be referred to as 'Slinky' managers! Bloody useless, apart from making you smile when you get to push them down the stairs!
I had fun with access 2.0 in the 90's
It was pretty powerful for an Office application, but you did have to shoehorn Visual Basic code behind every button.
Recognising its limitations was key. I created a great company phone book, for example. Simple & functional.
The PHB's then demanded that I write a system that could track shipping containers around the world, create historical invoices in assorted currencies, and that could know, by magic, when users input details incorrectly, and even, when they didn't input any details at all, know exactly what was missing. Sigh.
Re: I had fun with access 2.0 in the 90's
I remember having a similar request for 'sanitising and correcting' entries made by aeronautical engineers within an aeronautical engineering database. My reply was along the lines of - If I could develop a system that could correct qualified and experienced aeronautical engineers then I wouldn’t be handing it over to the overlords of my current IT contract, but instead I’d be making Billions in the AI sector.
All that counselling, wasted
A repressed memory has just popped up to the surface.
"We'll prototype it in Access then port it to SQL Server. Microsoft have a porting tool so we can just run it through that and Bob's your uncle".
Re: All that counselling, wasted
I wouldn't call it a repressed memory.
Argument for the Defence, perhaps...
#TheresBeenATerribleAccident
Re: All that counselling, wasted
"we can just run it through that..."
Back in the day (some 35+ years ago) I was taught that:
- Just
- Only
- Easily
DON'T use those words.
Re: All that counselling, wasted
With the corollary that you should never trust anyone who does use them.
A nice little story but hardly a damning indictment of Access, since clearly it was the Ops Manager who was the "Tool" in this case, albeit the wrong one. I'm pretty sure the guys would have had the same problem no matter what he used to create his app.
"Ever been faced with an over enthusiastic manager with some, but not quite enough, IT skill?"
Yes.
They were the bane of my life when I was doing desktop support at an oil refinery. Our team drew up a blacklist of managers known to fiddle around with the applications and settings on their PCs and laptops and if possible they were put at the back of the queue. In the end it was only given to a few more temperate members of the team to sort out as otherwise things might have been said and done that did not exactly accord with the SLAs we were working to.
As the old saying goes "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." And in a lot of cases expensive as well.
While it might not be the best tool for the job, sometimes it's the only one you're allowed to get your hands on.
Back in my own "amateur" days, I was tasked by a manager to create a piece of software to manage regularly occurring tasks (think regular reviews for customers). It was a little more complicated than that, but not much more. Something that was just out of Excel's reach. Now, I did put in a request for access to an instance of SQL (in whatever form), but I was denied. So I put an access data file on the network share, protected it every way I knew how, and then made a "client" file that I could distribute to my team-mate's machines (almost entirely consisting of VBA code and a form for the front-end). I freely admit it was a very janky setup, but it was made to work with the tools I had available. It increased the output of the team three-fold. It also was my gateway into actual IT work.
Access has it's place.
Access woes
It does - the trouble is that isn't usually the place you find it. A few years ago I was involved in a project to change platforms - the new one had stricter security rules and Access was banned. Every so often, the hideous memories of migrating the Access databases that emerged from all the dark corners into SQL come back to haunt me and the Data Architect. All were locally constructed by enthusiasts, not one was screwed together properly - if there was a convoluted, long winded way of doing something, they found it. On the other hand, it does a very good job of cataloguing my huge collection of cookery books.
The problem is usually not the tool that is used, but the tool that uses it.
I fully agree. But with Access it certainly is both.
Personally I like Access when it's just me using it with copies of data from elsewhere. I've used it as a data warehouse to create reports for years and never had any problems. Anything else is a no-no.
At least they used a database
Going back 30 years, there was a tools team who were responsible for developing tools for developers to use.
This team had been working for a year on a project to track defects using VM/CMS flat files as a database, and a hand built gui. I was asked to evaluate/test it prior to it "going live".
I asked the users what they wanted. One manager said he wanted a list of defects of people working for him, and people who used to work for him. I went to the tools team with the list of requirements. They looked shifty and said, they could provide these features in a few months.
I naively asked, "well cant do you a SQL query of this list of names". "SQL, what's SQL?" they said. After a long pause I said it was IBM's strategic database which runs on VM, and does databasey things, like queries and updates. End of conversation - and we all went home.
I went in on Sunday, created a DB2 database, an ISPF front end (which has support for tables) and about 200 lines of glue code in rexx.
Monday morning, I went in and said to the tools team - this is the sort of thing I was looking for. I did this in under a day!
Tuesday I was up in front of my boss for upsetting the tools team - apparently after I left one of them burst into tears.
Wednesday I was up in front of my bosses, boss who quietly said - well done - next time just be more tactful when you tell someone they've wasted a year reinventing the wheel.
the tree of life....
1. He uses pen and paper and is a luddite, but I use Excel
2. He uses Excel which is no way suitable, I use Access.
3. She uses Access which is a nightmare, I use Oracle
4.He still thinks relational databases are a good idea whereas I know the future is unstructured databases
5. I can't believe that you are all using a computer for this stuff - I just keep a tally on an abacus.
[slot yourself into the hierarchy - but don't ever think it isn't circular)
Filemaker Pro anyone? :)
To be fair, Microsoft Access does have its uses.
Indeed, it has: killing my nerves, breaking my will to live. Didn't find any other use and I'm unwilling to investigate any further. Nuke it from orbit! and so on...
Does you does or does you don't take access?
Access is my flexible friend
Simon says
A true BOFH would have invested the surpluses thrown up by Access into a pub, the shortfalls would have gone into the evidence file kept on the actions of the OM.
Don't dis Access :-)
In 2006 I wrote a timesheet management system with a web front end (classic ASP) and an Access back end. Contractors enter their work hours into the system and it generates their invoices for them and they get paid. It's very simple. It doesn't tie into the office back-office systems or any of that nonsense. The office staff look at the contractor-generated hours/invoice, validate the hours, pay them, and mark the invoice as paid.
They all love it because it's simple, doesn't require anyone to install any software, and works in the browser on desktop and mobile devices.
They are still using it. It's survived numerous server upgrades over the years but its still running just fine. Yeah, I should have used SQL server or something, but they wanted something cheap. And since it's been running so long there is no way they'll pay for it to be upgraded to a different backend! Their argument: "It's been running for 14 years. There's nothing wrong with it!"
If I ever do get tasked with upgrading it, since it's all really simple Access tables, it will be a piece of cake.
I'm quite fond of Access to be fair. Though I never used it for the Forms/VBA stuff ever. Just used it as a data store and query engine.
Hmm ...
" ... has frequently been found rammed into the most distressing of places ... "
Sometimes still in its original packaging.
As a student I had an occasional job for Virgin Megastore.
Periodically they did a stock take of all their stuff - so they'd flood the place with students looking for a bit of cash for a nights work.
You'd get a print out of what should be there in a section of alphabetised CDs, and note down anything that wasn't there and fish out anything incorrectly placed there.
Notional idea was to spot 'shrinkage'/what had been stolen, but often as not you'd find excess stock - but as there was no way of adding stock back into the inventory, it just got given away as a bonus to us at the end of the evening.
(and suspiciously entire stock of some albums, seemed to have managed to distribute themselves randomly across the store - meaning they both got recorded as stolen, and also distributed to the stock-takers as excess stock)
"Ever been faced with an over enthusiastic manager with [..] not quite enough, IT skill?"
All the damn time.
If you don't know how to write the code, don't tell me what I'm supposed to put in it. I don't care about your little pet, I just want to get the job done right.
Access
Access is not part of our default Office install and never will be! When I took over here we had a number of private databases running, I put a stop to them and insisted data is held in the main ERP system where possible.
We have one application, a data driven label printing program, that uses it but that's only active on the runtime version of Access on an RD server.