I wish you'd chosen a different subject line, Craig. You know as well as I
do that anyone who knows the answer to that specific question can't talk
about it here.

More generally I have some sympathy with your view. Access attempts to be
all things to all people - or at least to a wide spectrum of creators and
users of databases. It's not easy to balance the demands of professional
developers and information workers (or is it knowledge workers this week, I
forget?) in one application. There are a lot more of them than there are of
us, so they get the lion's share of the attention. A lot of the features
designed for those people get in our way.

On the other hand, we benefit from a lot of ease-of-use features too. For
several months now, I've been spending more time working with Visual Studio
..NET, developing ASP.NET pages, than with Access. In VS .NET, there are no
end-user features to get in the way, and you can do stuff that you just
can't do in Access (though most of them are things you'll rarely *want* to
do in a typical Access application). But when it comes to point-and-click
graphical designers, Access knocks spots of VS .NET. And one of the reasons
the Access graphical designers are so good is that they were designed to be
easy to use by people who are not professional developers.

Silly mis-features like lookup fields and datasheets (my personal
'favourite' is the 'create table by entering data' feature) are part of the
price we pay for some of the best RAD tools in the business. Up to now, the
benefits of membership have proved worth the price of admission. How long
that will continue to hold true remains to be seen. Perhaps one day we'll
get a tool with the power of VS .NET and the ease-of-use of Access. Won't
that be something to see! :-)

--
Brendan Reynolds (MVP)

"Craig Alexander Morrison"
wrote in message ...
I know, I know ... beta NDA's. After Access 95 I refused to sign anything,
sometimes the price to be "on the inside" is just too high.

It really is a pain, Access 2006 looks even worse. (sigh)

It would be great to have a de-install all wizards option, and a
developer's
switch to chuck out all the "useability".

I noticed someone asking about Access Professional as opposed to Access
Standard and at first I thought they are just confused with the edtions of
Office. Then I thought wouldn't it be good to actually have two editions
of
Access (really just a series of predetermined options set in the Registry)
one edition containing all the silly stuff they have been adding since
Access 2/97 the other streamlined for developers. The next version of
Access
is going to be a horrible explosion of Form and Report wizards, I even
hear
that you will be able to design a form/report and the tables will be
created
for you (Lotus Approach did something like this 10 years ago, better
blatant
than never), great for users creating a typical spreadsheet in a database
app, unprintable for serious developers. This is what the lookup field and
the subdatasheet have been leading up to, sorry.


--
Slainte

Craig Alexander Morrison