On 05/03/12 16:41, Clive George wrote:
On 05/03/2012 14:22, Bernard Peek wrote:
On 05/03/12 12:57, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Mon, 5 Mar 2012 04:18:33 -0800 (PST), jgharston wrote:

Word and Excel do need to be taught,

No, word processing and spreadsheets. You don't teach somebody
to drive a Ford Focus, you teach them how to drive a car.

True enough, but AFAIK there is no "generic" word processor or
spreadsheet out there so you have to choose something and, although
it pains me to say it, Word and Excel are the defacto standards out
there.

Some schools are using Open/Libre Office for word-processing and
spreadsheets, but there is still no usable alternative to MS Access.

Does "no usable alternative" include MS Access itself?

I've been doing databasy-stuff professionally for over 20 years now and
have still never had to touch access :-)

That's probably your loss. Some people use it very badly for jobs that
it's not suited for. But for the jobs it does well there is nothing else.

It's good for rapid prototyping without needing a single line of code.
It includes a database engine, interfaces to back-end systems,
import-export tools, a visual forms designer and a very powerful report
generator. You can get some of those features in separate products but
they won't integrate as well. There have been various attempts at doing
the same thing under Linux but none that I would trust my data to.



--
Bernard Peek