I am not sure what MS hoped to accomplish with this version of Access, other than to make it easier for most Access users, who seem to use Access as a glorified Excel spreadsheet. Having developed in Access for many years, this major revision is a little off-putting. It looks just like FileMaker, which I personally dislike.That being said, it has all the basic functionality of the older versions, except with a very forced FileMaker interface that is hard to overcome. You can down-convert to mdb files, so that is a good feature. Otherwise, the most significant update is the menu ribbons, which are a pain to relearn, and the XML formatting, which remains to be seen if it will be useful in the Office environment. Since they are pushing SharePoint quite succesfully, I think this will pay off for MS in the long run, but otherwise, just be prepared to shell out some retraining dollars.
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