ugh Crystal Reports.  Sorry, feels like a jumper thats too sizes too small
(very restrictive).

I believe it has been said many times that Access is a RAD (rapid
development environment), and to that end is very good at what it does.
Unless you know that your database is going to be used by lots of users, or
if you know that there are some extremely complicated things you wish to do
with it, stick with Access.

With Access, you want to build a form that is related to a table, you
select that table as its datasource and drag controls onto the form - hey
presto.

With VB you need to create the recordset, and populate each control
yourself.

That is just one area where Access is simply faster and easier to mess
about with.

However, making the transition is fairly smooth to be fair - once you know
any VBA you get the gist of the layout of the language, the correct
syntax's and so forth.

What I suggest, and it is something I adopt all the time, is to build my
interim solution in Access, Excel, Word, whatever. Once the bugs have been
ironed out and you've found that the end user actually wanted something
other than what they asked for, then you look at whether you want to move
it into something else.

Hope that helps

John Webb