An acquaintance of mine is an accountant. He uses it when his spreadsheets get too big/busy/complex. He's not "technical", but he is quite intelligent and is very familiar with Excel, has even written a few VB macros here and there. It's perfect for him. I assume the thousands of people just like him are the answer to your question.
Thanks for the story. I can imagine that, as I said
> creating a glorified Excel for some specific office tasks
What I'm interested in is cases of using Access for something other than a specific office task - it seems Access is still used for some serious business in many businesses (pun not intended).
Well, my point is that I think it's entirely possible that the only real use for MS Access is as a glorified Excel spreadsheet. That seems like a fine use case with a pretty significant market share! When you get right down to it, that's all most small businesses that use "real" relational databases do with them, either.
My first job out of school was fixing someone's bright idea of writing a few dozen ecommerce websites with Access as a data store. They stored the CC# so it could be run later as a card not present purchase. It was nightmare fuel, this was in ~2006.
