Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die
A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent&#x2F;received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.<p>But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.