Mac Forum / Applications / Other MS Products / May 2008

I WISH! One of my biggest gripes about Office for the Mac is the lack of Access, as a result I don't own Mac Office. I'm a SQL Server DBA and do a lot of database development, and I have to run Parallels in order to get Access. FileMaker might be acceptable to some, but it doesn't come close to my needs. I haven't tried 4D, perhaps that's my next step. If that doesn't work, then it'll probably be MySQL and PHP.

I would really like to know why Access is not available for the Mac, I have yet to see a satisfactory answer. My guess is that Office Pro is a major income stream for MS on the PC platform and they don't want to dilute that stream. They may think there are not enough potential sales to bother porting it, or it's also possible that the code is extremely non-portable and they don't want to go to the bother of overhauling it for a small market.

One word of warning re: Parallels and Access. Make sure that you update your Parallels to the latest 3.x version. Under older versions of Parallels, you had to have your MDB files in a native NTFS partition, now you can have them in your shared Parallels folder. Before the patch you would get an error message along the lines that Access did not recognize it as a valid MDB.