Origins MS Access Links...

tl;dr I've been working with, or on Microsoft Access for more than 25 years. Access has been good to me, so this is my small way of giving back to the Access community... and to show Access is still a viable tool, with a vibrant community.

Like most people I fell into Microsoft Access. My formal education is in Architectural Engineering and I was fortunate to have a professor who required us to write computer programs as our homework. I did some QuickBasic in college, but it wasn’t until I started tinkering with Visual Basic 1.0 that I realized I really needed some kind of database behind the kind of apps I wanted to write. At the time there was no easy way to use a database with Visual Basic.

In the early 90’s I was working for a company in Melbourne, Australia and talked them into getting a copy of FoxPro to see if I could use it to replace the 1,000s of Excel files we were creating. I was quickly overwhelmed by the complexity of FoxPro and realized it wasn’t going to work. A few months later I was back in the States for Christmas and got my hands on a $99 copy of MS Access 1.0. (Anyone remember the $99 for 99 days program?) It was a database that was easy to understand, with a form designer, a report designer and some kind of programmability layer. I was immediately hooked, and proceeded to spend the next several months learning how to fail in Access.

Shortly after returning to the States I got a one-month temporary contract working with Access for Lockheed Aerospace. That one-month gig turned into nine months. In those nine months I grew tremendously as an Access developer and made enough to put a down payment on my first house. More importantly it gave me the confidence that I could make a living from working with Microsoft Access.

Fast forward 15 years and I had the opportunity to go work for Microsoft on the Access team and help make it a better product. While at Microsoft I worked on the Access 2010, 2013 and 2016 releases. I learned a ton. I made some good friends at Microsoft and in the MVP community.

Some of my career highlights with Microsoft Access...

I’m now back to my roots and building custom data driven solutions for clients with a focus of moving Access and SQL Server databases to the Cloud. We found the combination of a SQL Server Azure backend, with a Microsoft Access frontend and an ASP.net MVC project to expose functionality to the web, is a rapid and cost-effective solution for our clients.

Creating this site is my way of giving back a little to a community that has been very good to me over the years. The goal of this site is to build the largest repository of quality Microsoft Access related links... and keep them current.

Cheers,

Kevin (aka MrAccess)