Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails!
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The thing about Access is that it actually is fun, at least as compared to OpenOffice Base. Access is far more clearly documented and its report generator is much more useful.
I wrote a little newspaper orders, deliveries and billing tracker for my local newsagency/general store as an exercise in evaluating Base, and to get useful output from it I ended up ignoring the inbuilt report generator and just using OpenOffice BASIC to generate Writer documents. On the other hand, the newsagent really likes it and is still using it five years on, and despite the underlying application having been upgraded several times (it's currently running in LibreOffice 5) it has required no changes, has lost no data, and hasn't cost him a cent since my original fee. Not convinced Access would have matched that record.
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On the other hand, the newsagent really likes it and is still using it five years on
That's a success.
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To be fair, the system it replaced was a hideous proprietary DOS-based thing apparently written in CBASIC, licence-key-locked to specific hardware (a very shaky old PC running Windows 95 in this instance), with a long-gone vendor and capable of printing address labels only to a specific model of dot matrix printer on obsolete and increasingly hard to source fanfold media.
The previous proprietors had inherited that mess from the proprietor before them, and had kept it limping along for years (with a little network printing hack I wrote them in later years, after the printer eventually died). The licence for this piece of crap had cost thousands of dollars, and the licences for whatever it was that other local newsagents had upgraded to instead were edging up to ten thousand, so they never even considered trying to replace it. But when the new guy bought the business he took one look at it and said "No. That's not staying".
It wasn't hard to do better. Charged him $800 for my time, IIRC, and supplied the software conditional on him agreeing to let me flog tweaked versions to anybody else who wanted it, which I've never actually pursued doing.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said:
Have you never heard of Access?
He was talking about “fun”.
Indeed, that was my point. He claimed that anything other than Outlook is more fun than Outlook, I offered Access as a counterexample.The thing about Access is that it actually is fun
OK, using VBA in Access, then.
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The thing about Access is that it actually is fun
Yeah, no, it's not. If you have any idea what databases are you'll spend the majority of the time trying to convince it to DO WHAT I TELL YOU TOOOAAAAAARRRRGGGGBLAAAAA!
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Much like Outlook then.
