the annoying thing is, serious mentioned a home user using an access database for storing something.

No home user will have bought a copy of office that contains access, it is only the professional that has it.

The big thing that needs to be addressed is compatibility with other places you use. Almost anyone working for a company will be dealing with ms office, it is just standard, it maybe shouldnt be but it is, now if you try and take a word document and put it into another one of the free alternatives you will get some funny things happening, formatting, anything embedded, they all go a bit pear shaped.

Sure if you save it as an rtf file then it would be fine, but you lose the whole point of using a decent word processor and all the formatting, not to mention you might as well be using wordpad.

I have worked for a company that had to pass data between itself and other companies, and you cant use pdf all the time, acrobat just aint practical for day to day use. If you want decently formatted stuff that you know will be compatible with anothers systems you use office. Simple as

it is great if you want someone to see it, not so great if you need someone to edit it.

it is a great archival and reading document tool

not so great as a quick and easy pass around tool

plus the fact that noone knows how to use acrobat so every single person would have to be taught, and dont say it is so easy anyone can use it, go meet some of the people who work in offices.

people have grown up with office and know how it works, for the majority you cant train them to do the same in another program easily

roflmao. Then your woefully nieve to the power of a true database.

For contact information I use Outlooks own contacts manager. Includes home addresses, business addresses, as many phone numbers as I have for a person, along with notes and so on.

If your a user of thunderbird then that too has a contacts manager inside of it.

Using access or similar just to store peoples addresses is a wee bit like cracking a nut with fat man.

The reason they cut access out of home editions is because people dont need that functionality! people dont use it, and access is a bloody powerful DBMS, and so costs quite a bit.