History of Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access came into being in 1992 with version 1.0 and coincided with the introduction of Microsoft Windows. This introduced new software concepts (at least to the consumer market) such as drag and drop, form and report writing capabilities, and wizards to help the beginner get a job done. It also introduced a way for different database packages to talk to each other. This new technology was called ODBC, or Object Database Connectivity.

The following year, Microsoft built on these features with Access 1.1. This is also the year they purchased their competition, FoxPro. Since Access was actually part of the Microsoft Office environment, they introduced the ability for these Office programs to communicate with each other. As an example, users now had easy mail-merge capabilities with Microsoft Word. The program also now had the ability to handle more data.

In 1994, Access 2.0 came out with even more wizards, better development tools, and significant improvements to the Jet database engine that made running queries considerably faster.

With the introduction of Windows 95 came the introduction of Office 95. In addition to the improved form and report writing capabilities, VBA was formally made the development language behind all the Office programs.

In 1997, the Web was starting to grow and Access 97 came with tools that helped it integrate with web applications. It was able to speak with HTML and publish data to the Web. VBA also took a step closer to becoming more OOP (object-oriented programming) friendly, with the introduction of modules to hold the VBA procedures. A number of other development tools were also introduced.

Access 2000 made a significant improvement in programming with the introduction of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). We will be spending a significant part of this book discussing that very topic. This version also introduced increased capabilities for working with the SQL Server database engine. Access 2002 improved on this capability by tightening something called referential integrity. This means that if data is edited in one table, those edits cascade to related data in another table. Also, XML capabilities were introduced.

Finally the present version, Access 2003, has expanded the XML capabilities and added some unique programming and debugging tools.