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Post-Beta 1 Access 2007 (and Office 2007, of course)

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Now that we are way past Beta 1, there has been a lot of improvements in Access 2007. But besides actual bug fixes and additions, perhaps the most visible change is the further UI polish we did since Beta 1. Here's how it looks like (click to see it full picture):

All other Office apps you know also have underwent some good polishing (you can see other pictures and FAQs/docs here). IMHO, Access looks the best of the bunch, but I'm biased :). 

I'm very interested in any comments you have on the UI - what do you think about it? Any concerns?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2006

    What gets me mad at data access applications like MS Access is how counter-productive are tables displayed, always taking enough width so that the horizontal scrollbar must be used just to see table columns. Not very productive. Are you making things easier in V2007?

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2006
    Stephane - what is the exact issue you want to address? From I understand, you're talking about visualizing data with a lot of columns.

    If so, it bears the question if you need all the columns all the time. In Access, it is pretty simple to hide/unhide columns to reduce the set you're looking at. In Access 2007, we have much-improved filtering that makes it even easier to zero in on data.

    Even further, we are also introducing a new feature that allows you to create queries from what you're looking at in tables. So, you can open a table, hide/unhide columns, sort and filter them and then save as a new query. That query will show you the exact set of data you were looking at. This is particularly handy in this situation, since if you only work with a set of columns at a time, you can create a query for each and work off the queries. (Of course, you can also create a form/report off of the queries and work off of it.)

    Finally, if you have to have all columns displayed all the time, you should consider using a Split Form in Access 2007 for this. The Split Form allows you to see the datasheet with all the data, but also a single record form along with it. So in this case you could, for example, hide some column in the datasheet part of the Split Form (showing the ones that you are most likely to read rather than change) and only show some of them in the form part, particularly the ones that you change frequently. The point is that you can mix and match and show parts of the set of data in each part of the Split Form, so you can actually fit more data into it - but you need to be careful as not to make things confusing.

    Notice that I'm not even touching on things you can do right now in Access 2003, such as using a report to visualize the data. In a great number of cases, tables are used for data entry/visualization when they really aren't the best fit - it's just more readily available and ends up being used. That said, as I mentioned above, table and datasheet view forms should me much more powerful in Access 2007 with the new filtering and datasheet features coming out (such as adding columns with the right type without having to go into table design, adding lookups with drag'n'drop, etc).
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Hi, Interface is looking good, the tabs for the tabels reminds off SQL Server Mangement tools, and hopefully will be usefull.

    I just wondering if Access 2007 is going to include a largerdatabase size, the 2GB limit is fine in most normaly circustances, but can be a problem when you create databases that store a lot of images. I know Microsoft are not keen to extend this because they want people to use SQL Server for larger databases. But it would be still useful for the limit to be increased to say 4GB.
  • Anonymous
    March 23, 2006
    Hi Matthew,

    I understand your pain - that's a very common request. To give you the honest answer: we can't talk about that yet...

    And yes, for large data sets you probably are better served by using Access as a front-end and SQL or SharePoint as a back-end. This gives you the right mix of scalability (back-end) and flexibility (front-end).
  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2006
    Most impressive in terms of interface.