Microsoft Access as a Weapon of War

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A while ago (probably a decade ago, actually) I saw a report on a tracking system maintained by a U.S. Army artillery control unit.  This system was capable of maintaining a bearing on various units in the field to help avoid friendly fire.  I consider the U.S. Army to be the most technologically advanced fighting force on Earth, but to my terror I saw something on the title bar of an application displayed on a laptop behind one of the soldiers they were interviewing:

Tracking.mdb

Oh yes.  Microsoft Office Suite had made it onto the battlefield.  My hope is that it was just running as a front-end for a more proficient database (no offense Access people), or that the soldier was tracking something else like KP duty or fantasy football scores.  But I could also see the corporate equivalent of a pointy-haired boss walking into a cube and asking someone who had piddled with Access to build a database for HR forms.  Except this pointy-haired boss would have been a general, the cube would have been a tank, and the HR forms would have been targets that, if something went amiss, would have been hit by a 500lb artillery round.

Hope that solider could write a good query 🙂

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Damon Armstrong

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Damon Armstrong is a consultant with SystemwarePS in Dallas, Texas. He is also a blogger and author of Pro ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming and SharePoint 2013 Essentials for Developers. He specializes in the Microsoft stack with a focus on web technologies like MVC, ASP.NET, JavaScript, and SharePoint. When not staying up all night coding, he can be found watching a bunch of kids, studying Biblical topics, playing golf, or recovering from staying up all night coding.