Small Business Software
Software Building Blocks
A business may not have software developers in house to create systems. It is possible to get a company to write the software, but it could work out expensive. The beauty of MS Access is that it gave people with no database
development background the ability to put together simple systems. However, there is a
tendency for people to confuse this with software development - MS Access will allow you to put together a system, perhaps through the use of built in wizards which may solve your problem. Simple forms and data queries can be built - however if you need to go beyond this simplicity then you will need to know the VBA programming language. This takes time and can be done via the use of books, the internet or courses.
The use of the programming language can significantly enhance the system you are building. Some choose to use the built in macros to accomplish program like tasks - although MS Access has some great macros available, one issue with using them is that there is no error checking. If the macro fails you will get a none too helpful error message and the program will halt
unexpectedly. Using a programming language will allow you to trap for the particular error or any general error and take the appropriate action.
Information is important to any business and it is important to have good tools to extract and manipulate this data. To do this manually can be both time consuming and
repetitive. You need to find key information quickly - in seconds, not hours. Buying an off the shelf package may be a quick easy solution, but is it really going to meet your business needs and be easily maintainable? You don't want to find you are having to change the way your business works to suit the off the shelf package.