If your only reason for using Access is that you can get it for free, don't use it! Use MySql or Postgres. At work, we have several Access Databases that we use to track Trouble Tickets of various flavors. The DBs are constantly corrupting themselves and need frequent restores from tape backup. Don't lock yourself into this sort of mess.

Now that I've said that, what you are discussing is definitely possible to achieve with Perl. I can't really comment on writing traditional GUIs with Perl. But I will advocate for a browser based app.

Browser based apps written in Perl (or other P* language) have been dubbed LAMP, for Linux-Apache-MySql-P|(erl)|(ython)|(HP). They have some nice advantages:

• Price: All your tools are free.
• Scalability: You can build a system that can handle 1 or 1000 clients.
• Server Based: You don't have to install/maintain applications on multiple PCs.
• Rapid Development.
• Familiar interface: People are comfortable using their browsers and tend not to think of web pages as separate applications.
• Modest sytem requirements: I run Linux with Apache/mod_perl and Mason on my dev server - A PPro 200 w/ 96 MB RAM. I just wrote a forking webcrawler and that wimpy box can handle 3 hungry connections continually pulling dynamic content without excessive swapping, more RAM would make things better.

If you go with a browser interface, you should consider using some sort of templating system. Template Toolkit comes highly recommended, I like Mason, and embperl is popular. Some careful use of Super Search should turn up some sound info on your options. You may also want to look at tools like Zope or some of the PHP based site builders.

BTW, I never thought I'd see so many Perlmonks recommend using VB :). I haven't used it much, but it looks like it's got some great interface building tools. If one could hook up a VB interface to a perl app...

TGI says moo