So I've made the permanent switch to Office 2013. So far, so good.
I purchased an Office 365 subscription about a month ago and I've been playing with the various features of Office 2013 since the beta came out back in December. I like it a lot so far. It's very clean and well organized. I like the Office 365 subscription model because you just pay one price per month and don't have to worry about buying a whole new package next time Microsoft decides it wants to upgrade. Plus automatic updates come right down to your computers.
As far as my forte goes, there aren't a ton of NEW features in Access. Access 2013 is almost identical to 2010 with a few minor cosmetic (and nomenclature) differences. I'll be addressing these in an upcoming seminar shortly. I've had Access 2013 on my laptop for about 2 months now, playing with the various features. The only MAJOR upgrades have been to Web databases - which I'll cover in a separate seminar. I'm still NOT sold on them. They are very "version 1.0" looking. I'm sure once Microsoft puts the polish on them that they deserve, and they become as robust as the full version of Access, you'll start seeing them everywhere.
I was able to safely install Office 2013 on the same PC as my older Office 2010 version. Both seem to work OK. I want to keep 2010 around for training purposes JUST IN CASE.
One thing that's SUPER aggravating is that the Office 365 install process shows a welcome video with NO WAY TO SKIP IT. I hate that. Just like I hate it when web sites play video without warning you and your speakers are up real loud. Ugh.
With my Office subscription, I purchased what they call the "Office 365 Midsize Business" package. They have so many different subscription levels and their web site is organized SO POORLY that it took me FOREVER to figure out which package was right for me. I wanted all of the Office 2013 apps, of course. I also wanted the ability to set up hosted Access databases online. For this, you need Sharepoint service. It's not clear WHICH of their packages was the least expensive (because I only need it for ME, not a team of 100 employees) but yet still gives me what I want. Turns out the "Midsize Business" package is the right one. It gives me the Sharepoint hosting, but only for 1 user. I'd have to add more people on if I want to share the database with a "team" of users... which is really all hosted Access databases are good for now anyways... SO FAR.
I did set something cool up though. Just for a trial, I built table and published it to my Sharepoint site. Then I was able to easily connect to it from multiple Access 2013 databases. This is REALLY cool. This allows you to have your TABLES hosted in the "cloud" up on Microsoft's server, yet you still work with a local "desktop" Access database front-end. This is great for sharing information with other team members... but again, it's not quite ready for PUBLIC database use yet. I'll be making a short seminar on how to do this in the coming weeks. It's really cool. Want to share your customer list or order history with your sales team but you DON'T want to spend a lot of time on it - just post your table up to Sharepoint.
More to come....
13 years ago
