MS Access - the best of apps, the worst of apps.

Microsoft Access. It's possibly the most painful application our users run. It does some fundamentally stupid things:

If your default printer is set to automatically select a paper tray, Access will fail with a deeply cryptic error when you try to preview a report. In fact, once you know what's going on, it sorta makes sense.

The problem is that if Access is going to print preview a report, it needs to know what size of paper it's going to print on, what the printable area is, and probably other stuff. And so it checks to see what the default printer is set up to use. And if the printer is set to select the tray dependent on the paper size requested, then Access can't find out. As I say, it sorta makes sense. But surely

'Your default printer is set to select an output tray automatically, and so Access doesn't know what size to print this report. Please select a paper size....'

wouldn't be that hard?

There's others, but that's the one that bit us AGAIN today. I'd happily advise my colleagues 'this MS Access? Yeah, it looks nice, but to be honest it's a piece of crap. Don't bother with it.'

But I can't. Why not? Because there's nothing else that does the same job. It's easy to build a moderately complex and sophisticated database application, with integrated reporting and stuff. And when I say easy, I mean easy for actual humans, who do actual jobs.

The truth is, for all that it's buggy as hell, and doesn't scale well, and uses perversely tweaked SQL syntax, and on and on, Access is the killer application, competing in a field of one.

There's nothing else out there which does 'desktop database application' well enough most of the time to compete. Show me I'm wrong.