What happened to Pivot Table view in Access 2013?

Rene,

I can't disagree with anything you said.

I can tell you that MS does do a significant amount of product testing, focus groups, forum monitoring, etc. This is to help them determine where to spend their resources. So yes, expressing your disappointment of the removal of Pivot tables in this forum can't hurt. 

I think I can safely say that MS is well aware that this move upset a good number of people. Personally, I don't think it will be enough to spur them to invest the resources to restore it. But who knows what the future will bring.

Ok, here is my opinion in what I think is a nice and polite way:

I do not consider myself a developer at all. I used Access because it helped me manage data in a more powerful way than Excel. I'm not sure if that would qualify me as a knowledge user, an end user or what,  but I think that's beyond the point. Like most people in this forum, I was simply disappointed with the removal of the pivot table feature and wanted to voice my disappointment. 

I have the impression that Microsoft, like most big companies these days, uses these forums to gather information about users' opinions in order to eventually create better products, but I might be mistaken. Every message from Microsoft or MVPs in this specific forum has been  either "you don't really need the feature because you have it in Excel" or "Microsoft has a strategy and it does not target you".  

As you can imagine it's a bit frustrating.  I think it would be better to at least acknowledge there is a group of people dissatisfied with this decision rather than trying to underscore all the positive things that Microsoft offers. This would make us customers feel heard and would offer Microsoft the opportunity to develop better products. 

Thanks.

The Pivot Table feature is designed to provide flexible summary query support for databases.

It is bizarre that Microsoft should remove it from Access but not Excel.

I wonder if this comment will be censored away too.

It's a shame that some important points on both sides have been culled here.

I apologise to Scott that he found my criticisms of his opinions so offensive he had to complain to a moderator about them. I dispute that I was any less "nice" than he was. He more or less suggested I couldn't read almost from the beginning of our exchange.

The material point here is that the Pivot Table is fantastic feature that is a perfect component in a database product. It was brought into Access in the 2003 release. For almost ten years, the Access community began to rely on them as an easy and powerful way of summarising data but for some unfathomable reason Microsoft decided to drop the feature in the 2013 release.

Scott argued that this was because Access was focused as an "end user tool". I disputed this. I argue that Access has always been much more than an end user tool (think: FileMaker Pro on Mac) and I gave a lot of historical evidence for this.

By this logic, Pivot Tables should be removed from Excel too, as it is more of an End User tool than Access.

Access still is (despite recent dumbing down), and has always been, both an end user tool and a developer too. Both. It's not binary.

Thank you