Unfortunately, some habits are quite hard to break and human simply doesn’t change easily. We have fear of doing more work than necessary. Unfortunately, we could use Microsoft Access to do things much more easily and efficiently. It is known to provide small businesses with a variety of benefits. It is often seen as a vital part of many back-office tasks. Obviously, businesses need various resources and systems to support their profitable and growing operations. Here are reasons why Microsoft Access should be a perfect match for any SME:
- Reduced cost: If we have Microsoft Office suite installed on our computer, then probably it includes Microsoft Access. Users don’t require additional license to use Access and it means, we could add one more member to the well-known Word, Excel and PowerPoint triumvirate.
- Better flexibility: Just about anyone can create and manage Access databases. In fact, we don’t need a degree in programming to use Microsoft Access. With a short, structured training and basic computing knowledge; we could use a software that pay use huge dividends in the long run. If we further factor in the cost benefit of using Access and the brief time needed to learn Access, the return on our investment would be immense. As our business grows, Access database can be redeveloped. As our business grows, we need to adapt our tools and Access allows us to do that very easily.
- Good migration and scalability: Admittedly, Microsoft Access isn’t a true server/client database system. Also, its built-in data management tool doesn’t handle data scalability easily. But fortunately, we should be able to migrate Access to a bigger database system, such as SQL server. It is particularly essential if our businesses begin to out-grow the current database. Obviously, there’s a downside to this approach and we may need additional licenses to expand our database. Even so, Microsoft Access should be adequate for most small businesses. Should we feel our business has the capacity to move onward and we have the budget to choose more dedicated database, then we could begin the migration. Fortunately, we don’t have to redo all the database tasks, since it should be easy to transform our current tables in the database to an external database engine.
- Longevity: Any system should have defined lifecycle and it should be the part of any long-term plan. Business owners normally have an insight on their future business requirements and it is a good thing that Microsoft Access offers long term longevity. The company releases new Access releases each year and the migration between these releases is typically seamless; because we could simply use database from older Access version to the newer one. Microsoft may add a bunch new additions to new Access versions, but it always keep good backward compatibility to older versions.
There you have it! Any small business should consider adding Access to extend the usability of Excel and it is rather amazing how many companies are reluctant to use Access.