>>Well I'm sticking with my prediction that it will be Office+SQlServer that will 'replace' programming for the typical business environment, and sooner than people think.
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>That's come and gone. Thinking that users could connect to data, retrieve it and update all through Word and Excel. Way too hard and too complicated.

You sound like the guy who told me emphatically that backgammon would never be computerized < s >.

Really, though, you're not giving software enough credit.
With Word "forms" it seems just a simple dialogue box to ask the user a few questions (simple ones) and let the software figure out what to do with entered data. It can even revise structures as it goes along and 'learns' more. About all the user would have to do is to 'relate' forms in the same "project" (call it something else for an office worker) and the software can figure out the rest or ask simple questions to find out.

It's "programming" that has gotten far too complicated. And Microsoft sells tools for programming yet basically ignores the BASIC requirement of business - to process DATA.

I'm 2 weeks into a new job at a very big shop. They have forms to 'control' everything. It wouldn't take much to have a Wod/SQL Server link to have the entered information go directly to a database. And other simple 'forms' to extract data when needed.