Tiang 

That sounds pretty awesome. Is this a scenario where we can give
non-technical users access to generate their own query reports based on data
in MSSQL?

Years ago, I did a lot of MS Access development and it was the most common
scenario. In fact, in micro businesses the most common situation was that an
in-house expert coded up an elaborate application, then got into trouble and
called in someone from outside to try to fix it up. 

These days, and for "enterprise applications", the in-house expert would be
called the domain expert. Under DDD he is an important component of the ALM
(don't you love these acronyms). 

Prior to VS for Office, (my) preferred approach was to re-write the Access
application using its support for classes (VB for Access language), create
some external DLLs where necessary, and use SQL Server Express as the
backend database. Apart from legacy spaghetti code and horrendous tables
(usually, poor relational design and dozens of fields), it was great fun. 

However, report design is a boring but very easy operation using the MS
Access report designer (which was for years far superior to anything that
was available via Microsoft languages / VS / SQL Server) - so the client
could do all of that. 

________________________________

Ian Thomas

Victoria Park, Western Australia

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