The Future of Microsoft Access

Now that we have seen a little of the history of Access, as well as taken a brief tour of its current look, let’s gaze into our crystal balls and predict where Microsoft is strongly indicating it is going.

There is no question that the Microsoft Office environment, of which Microsoft Access is a part, serves as the technological backbone for most businesses today. Microsoft has indicated that they will continue to place a great deal of their research and development in the Office environment.

Because of its ease of use, tremendous power, and relatively inexpensive cost, Access is not only serving as a personal database application tool, but is increasingly taking over the enterprise roles of what were, at one time, reserved for more sophisticated packages such as SQL Server and Oracle. There is no better place to see this than the increasing use of Access in building web sites.

Access 2000 took a major step forward with Data Access Pages. This meant that it now had a method to create HTML pages and bind data to them. As stated earlier, 2002 took this even further with the ability to save reports as XML documents. In addition, the ability to save a PivotTable and PivotChart as a web-based document was introduced. Version 2003 then expanded the XML capabilities.

Microsoft has made one thing abundantly clear: it is placing a lot of its future in the development of its new .NET environment. This environment, if it comes to fruition, will allow tighter integration of the components of the Microsoft Office environment with each other as well as the Web. This will allow people to share data with an ease that is not seen now. At the heart of that will be XML and its ability to integrate individual components on the Web.

You will be able to create a document in Microsoft Word, integrate data from Access into it, and then share the document with whomever you need to share it with right on the Web.

Because of this, development will be increasingly focused on web services and the .NET environment, which promises to make the development process increasingly easier and seamless. There are already strong indications that the next version of Microsoft Office will introduce significant changes to the VBA environment. We will probably see the use of Visual Basic .net in order to further integrate Office with web services.