Access stand-alone

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
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G'day all. Mrs Tannin uses Microsoft Access for various tasks. She has zero interest in any of the other MS Office applications and doesn't want to rent: she likes the pay once and own it model. Oh, and prefers that it be a proper Windows program, not a stupid Metro app.

Can you buy it? If so how and where?
 

fb

Storage is cool
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Seems like it is possible: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/access/cfq7ttc0hhmx?activetab=pivot:eek:verviewtab

I suppose the various tasks includes building forms in the UI?
She has no interest in learning SQL Server? I ask because Express edition is totally free with a limitation of 10GB of data/instance. Developer is also totally free, but not OK for production.
And SQL Server Management Studio is also totally free of course. It has some drag and drop functionality just like in Access.

And, whatever happend to Visual Fox Pro? :) I kind of liked that. It was useful when storing the database on a read only medium.
 
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Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Supposedly Office 2022 can be purchased by individuals, which suggests that the individual applications can as well. Also, a Microsoft 365 subscription DOES include access to standard Windows applications, but web apps as well. A "Home" license DOES include Access and can be installed on up to five devices. There's a lot of value in the 365 Home sub, since it also provides 1TB of OneDrive as well, even if it falls short compared to the utility of Google's cloud in some other ways. Here in the USA, 365 Home is around $7/month, but sometimes goes on sale for as little as $5/month.

There's also an extremely valid issue with Microsoft, which is that different parts of its platforms create different IDs that it treats differently even if they're tied to the same individual. I've run across people who have gotten locked out of a 365 account because of something their kid did on Xbox Live, or because the Windows Live account they have isn't associated with purchases they made at Office.com. Credit card transactions aren't sufficient proof of identity for this stuff, so if you fall in to that particular hell, there's almost no way to get your stuff back. Apparently there are something around a dozen different sorts of "Microsoft Accounts" that MS says should be single sign on equivalent on its platforms. So, you know, screw that.

HOWEVER, the bar-none cheapest way to get Office is to obtain someone's leftover MSDN key. People sell them on shady web sites like G2A.com. These are valid keys for a product Microsoft refuses to offer to consumer end users, so you're ignoring the license requirements for your practical needs. I've bought these for home users a few times and I have not had issues and I usually pay about US$35 for one.

If you need a key for something Office 2013 or older, especially if you can make do with JUST Access, I definitely have some keys you can use because I have leftover MSDN keys that'll still work.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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And, whatever happend to Visual Fox Pro? :) I kind of liked that. It was useful when storing the database on a read only medium.

The only strictly-Windows programming I ever did was on Delphi (Object Pascal) and FoxPro/VFP, which was last updated in around 2007. Microsoft basically bought it to kill it, since its underlying database engine was substantially better than MSJet and could do about 90% of what MSSQL could at Access-like pricing. Delphi is still being maintained, but given how unpopular Pascal is, I'm not sure why.

FWIW I'd also advocate for building a .NET web application with MSSQL as a back end over doing anything with Access because MSJet is a flaming bag of poo. The skills needed are largely transferable for someone who knows Access and Visual Studio is free for personal use.
 

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I used Fox Pro + VB6 to create a CD based database application around 1999-2000. Very nice to work with if I remember correctly. But I have mostly been working with SQL Server.

Personallly I could/would use Management Studio (SSMS) as a GUI for smal scale manual input. For corporate use I would build some kind of GUI.

And I was wrong, the limit is 10 GB per database in Express, nothing else.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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SQL Express also has limits in terms of RAM and CPU cores that it'll use, but those aren't likely to be an issue for anything that runs at Access scale.
I have a customer who has used Act CRM for about the last 25 years. I just looked and the total amount of actual data in that MSSQL instance is a hair over 12MB.
 

fb

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I believe Access has a database size limit of 2GB?

I now remember a story from 1995, where a guy working for our city council apparently decided to build a journaling system to store all incoming+official documents - in an Access database... The documents were of course scanned and stored as blobs in the database. :)
 

Tannin

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Many useful and helpful answers, thank you all! We have a successful result. Access 2010 will be all she needs and it is working fine now.

The whole idea was to avoid having to learn new skills, FB!

Between the two of us we do have at least one bigger, fairly complex database, but that runs a PHP front end on MYSQL, which is a sensible tool for the job. (That one is my department. She doesn't do PHP and I don't use or understand Access. But between us we cover the bases and we are both happy.)
 

fb

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Glad to hear that it worked out. Access is not bad for its intended use, just a long time since I used it.

As a side note, it's also quite easy to kill performance in SQL Server. :)
 
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