It's been a long time, but as I recall there were two problems you'd run into with Access: 1. The database you're using was put together as if it were an excel

It's been a long time, but as I recall there were two problems you'd run into with Access: 1. The database you're using was put together as if it were an excel spreadsheet. There was data duplicated between tables but not linked in any meaningful or consistent way, and fields that were supposed to have a fixed set of choices were terribly unnormalized. Think of a column for colors where you have grey, gray, grya, or Gray that are all intended to be the same color, but were entered by differently and wouldn't show up as the same in the reports that were generated. 2. There were real limits of the capabilities of the technology. Performance would drop for a while, but eventually you'd hit hard size limits and have to split your file into multiple "databases". The first problem is definitely the kind of problem that you you're describing, where you have people working with a technology they aren't trained in. Workers with these systems had long check lists they would run through to massage the report data into the form they needed, and these check lists would grow as they found more and more edge cases. I used to think it was crazy, but now I realize the alternative when these systems were built was probably post-it notes on a wall. Sure, eventually they had to have someone rebuild their system (move it to a real RDBMS), but meanwhile the business provided it's value.