What happened to Pivot Table view in Access 2013?

Why take out a perfectly good feature like that?

Simple, ....

$$$ MONEY*$$$*

It is a return to the "bad-old days" when different "versions", aka "price-points", of the Office applications had different feature subsets,  ie "standard" vs "Professional" versions (see Visio!)

The bean-counters in accounting and marketing got together and figured out that they could "force" users to pay more to get the feature back in the only expensive package it is now offered.

Good for you Wayne, but the whole point of a PivotTable is its dynamic nature.

In Access 2003, 2007 and 2010 you could build a query (like a star schema to feed Analysis Services) and then base a form on it. It only takes a few minutes to do. Then, any user who knows anything about pivot tables can query the data in many ways without any coding whatsoever.

Why take out a perfectly good feature like that?

Algis Kuliukas

MCP 3343

******@kuliukas.com

We have mainly got Acc7 machines and use pivots for quite a bit of analysis.

We also have a few laptops with Acc13.  So I have simply added some reports with multi column subs so that people with Acc13 can still see the data - I have designed these to look almost exactly the same as pivots.

Not ideal (as it took me a while to code the reports) but it works fine.  I can't see what the problem is here. User don't care how the screen is populated they just want to see the numbers and it's up to the developer to enable this .

Excel Pivots do all that. No-one (presumably) is arguing for Access having the feature and not Excel. Excel is a great tool too. But why cull a really useful feature in Access? I have built several apps that use it to good effect.

This the latest addition of great Access database features that have been taken away to dumb the product down.

My three favourites...

1. Merge Replication.
2. Sophisticated Security
3. ADP (thin client) support.

Frustrating.

Algis Kuliukas

MCP 3343

******@kuliukas.com

Yet another disappointment to add to an ever growing list since Access reached its peak in 2003.

Honestly, what are Microsoft doing? They build the best, most versatile low/mid-range database product ever and then they proceed to vandalise it and dumb it down, presumably with the ultimate goal that there will be nothing to distinguish between it and FileMaker.

Listen, guys, between Microsoft Excel and building C# apps with .Net and a SQL Server back End, there is a HUGE solution gap which Microsoft Access has always filled better than anything else.

For prototyping, very small business, low-criticality, RAD or sophisticated single user development, Microsoft Access still (despite 11 years of incessant culling) is the easiest to learn, most productive, database product on the market.

I'd like to know who in Microsoft has been responsible for this bizarre deterioration by design. How can it be justified? Microsoft got big by treating the smart, single user developer with respect. They're now treating us with contempt.

Algis Kuliukas

MCP 3343

******@Kuliukas.com