Microsoft Access

And We were trying to figure out, this is now closing in on 20 years ago, how to better position ourselves in the marketplace.

And at the time, of course, we're battling everybody that's using Excel and Microsoft Access as their database front ends.

And, you know, heaven forbid, some Dbase and Lotus floating around out there.

And so the marketing company that we had worked with at the time, that's one of the things that they had recorded was there has to be a better way.

And then it required rehearsals.

How are you gonna rehearse all of that? A, a friend of mine helped me design a database, which was done in Microsoft Access, which was a complicated beast because it, even in those days, uh, long before ChatGPT, et cetera, it showed each singer what they would do, when their rehearsals were, what time they were, what they would be needed for, which bit, what they then did in the night, where they then walked to-

[laughs]

... where they moved into the building to perform this bit, that bit.

So what we decided to do was to just pull up our sleeves and use the tools we had.

One person from IT, myself, and our quality nurse at the hospital Built a Microsoft Access database in an afternoon.

We started populating it with patients, kind of manually structuring the data and putting it in there.

And we knew that they'd have a card for every patient with an incidental finding.

If it wasn't, we figured we would just start reaching out to people.

He's

starting out with Microsoft Access.

So it's tough to argue that there isn't a place in America that can't do the same, right?

And I saw, first of all, the lack of technology.

I mean, The first center I ever worked for, I built their first CAD inside of Microsoft Access.

It was horrible.

It was bad, but it was better than pen and paper and it was better than what they had, right? So, you know, after really analyzing the technology possibilities in those 911 centers, I did make the jump then to the dark side and spent a couple of decades doing CAD systems and 911 systems.

We started out with Microsoft Word.

We moved on to Microsoft Excel Made Easy, Microsoft Access for records management.

We learned how to present like a pro using PowerPoint.

We did a Microsoft evaluation and practical.

You might want to think about going into this super hierarchical system as a nurse or nurse practitioner, because you kind of tend to resist and kind of do your own thing.

And that was the place, that was the AIDS case management program where I, and this will also date me, I bought a do-it-yourself Microsoft Access book and flipped through the pages and created a database for the catheter nurses that were working in AIDS at the time.

So everybody had these kind of crazy ports and these nurses would go to the house because they had chemo, basically.

And the nurses would take care of their ports.

He manages construction projects and he wanted to build this database.

And at the time it was Access, Microsoft Access database.

And he's like, oh, you like programming? Got me a book on Microsoft Access and was like, build me this database for work.

I didn't do that because I didn't want to build something for my dad.

But I think that that was one of the jumpstarts that was like, all right, this is kind of enjoyable.

But there was nothing at the time that kind of could do that.

So I did a bit of research on the early internet and worked out that I could create a database with Microsoft Access.

and then

use something called Mail Merge to Microsoft Word and then basically have a standard template and then go, okay, here are all the fields and then just kind of populate all the bits of the report.

And so I don't think AI will kill design in the purest sense of the word.

Yeah.

On that first AI project that you worked on, were you rolling up your sleeves? Did you have the tower PC out and running a Microsoft Access database? Was that part of

it? Basically, yeah.

But it is a fun tool when used correctly.

At the end of the day, I need to think of it as some of us are out there that are old enough to remember like Microsoft Access when we were building databases back in the day and you had to go if then and all of that.

And this is just a really fast version of that.

You know, I wish I was the person who thought to reskin a database and call it Salesforce.