Product Reviews

With Access 2000, Microsoft has concentrated its efforts on four main areas - making information easy to find and use, adding Web-enabled features for sharing information, improving the data analysis tools, and providing better support for developers.

The most obvious change is a rework of the user interface. The database window has been revamped and now looks more like the other Office elements, with a split-pane navigation bar rather like that in Outlook. Part of this new look is the ability to set up custom groups of objects in your database, so that you can group together the tables, forms, queries and reports relating to customers in one custom group, and those relating to orders in another, for example. It's a neat way to sub-divide a database rationally as opposed to just physically.

While Access is one of the easiest such packages to use, any database is harder to get your head around than the equivalent word processor or spreadsheet. Microsoft has put a lot of thought into making Access easy to use, and many of the changes to this version are designed to further this aim. Many of these changes are cosmetic rather than providing any extra functionality, but they have the desired effect.

Access 2000 makes good use of Wizards to guide users through the creation of forms, reports and queries, and this release has benefited from improvements to the Database, Query and Analyser Wizards. The Database Wizard lets you create databases based on the samples provided with Access, or on one of the 20 or more templates. The Query Wizard has also been made simpler to use; when you choose a summary query, for example, it picks only the fields on which you could sensibly base numeric summaries.

While the performance analyser was present in the previous release of Access, not many people knew about it or used it. The analyser has been improved in this release, giving more sensible suggestions about where you might want to split tables or add indices. It also has more support for optimising external tables in SQL Server format.

Web enabled

Access shares many of the Web-enabled benefits seen elsewhere in Office, but also

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has a few tricks up its own sleeve. Forms and reports can be created in data access page format for viewing on the Web in suitable browsers such as Internet Explorer 5. The data access tools can be used to add, edit or view real-time data held in Access or SQL Server formats. Pages created in data access page format can be grouped and used to drill down through data - for example, starting with a summary report, then drilling down to the individual regions, all the way back to specific records. For giving users access to databases, without the need for a full Access 2000 installation, this is superb, but the data access tools still require the end user to own an Office 2000 licence.

You can now store HTML code in fields in your database and display it as formatted HTML text on Web pages. Another Web-enabled option lets you use hyperlinks to move between objects in your Access databases; for instance, you could have a hyperlink in a report which would lead to another report. While this facility was present in Access 97, the interface is simpler to use in this release.

Some of the key improvements are in Access' analysis tools, relating to client server databases, particularly SQL Server. Access now supports OLEDB so you can connect directly to SQL Server, and Access Wizards can now be used on SQL Server tables. An alternative database format, the Access Project, lets you set up a database that's purely a front end for SQL Server tables, stored procedures and views. You can also administer your SQL Server databases, with tools for replication, backup and security management.

Access rules the desktop database market among users, but developers have many other packages to choose from. This is perhaps one reason why some of the most useful changes in this release are aimed at the developer, including row-level locking, a choice of database engine, better security, and the ability to remove source code from applications.

Security improvements include a user-level security Wizard that lets you define individual security measures, and the ability to password protect your Visual Basic for Applications code on a separate security level - vital if you don't want end users altering code without your knowledge. If you need to go further still, you can have all the source code removed so there's no chance of any unwanted fiddling.

As an end user, the improvements to Access 2000 are good, but not earth shattering, although the ability to view and edit data and reports from the Internet will be extremely useful under some circumstances. This is more a release for the power user and developer, and looked at from this angle the improvements remove a number of previous irritations, and make Access a much more attractive option.