aHappyAppler

since I used Office on a PC. Missing from Office on Macs is MS Access. 

The last stable and functional version of Access I used was Access '97. The later versions I attempted to use were unstable, losing foreign key definitions being the most obvious problem. Back then, I was certain Access needed to be rewritten from the ground up to remove all the underlying hack code that made it unstable. 

Is Access a dead-end product for MS? It's offered only on PC versions of Office. From my perspective, it's the only desktop level database that has reasonable functionality. No other product has a reasonable relational db back end, and a nicely integrated front end. Claris is awful from every vantage point: functionality, cost, value. 

The result of no viable fully functional integrated desktop DBMS is we're relegated to using spreadsheets which isn't the same thing at all. 

I used that version to interface between mainframe applications and databases, Excel Spreadsheets and Access screens and its database effectively.

But, the root of the system was the mainframe databases that insured data security and integrity.  The spreadsheets and Access added considerably to functionality and user efficiency and control -- but I never trusted them to be the core of the system.  There were just too many possible points of failure.

SandyG said:

Would be nice if Microsoft would think about actually including functionality to review and check formula in Excel for Mac. It’s been in planning for years. Microsoft simply don’t care about Mac users. I couldn’t care less about dark mode I just want to be able to check 3 lines of formula. This is a basic piece of functionality that’s part of Excel but not if you run a Mac.