Mac Mini M4 & Access

I’ve always been a Windows person, right back to the early days of Windows 3.1, except for owning  iPhones. It was’t so much that I was a Microsoft fan-boy but you tend to stick with what you know and Windows has all the software products I need for personal and work use. I programmed on Linux servers for years though so I’d been interested in Macs when they adopted a Linux base for MacOS but not enough to actually buy one – they seemed expensive and had a limited range of software so I held off.

That was until we had to buy a new computer for Victoria (her old Windows machine needed constant updates and kept freezing) and we saw the Mac Mini M4 selling for around £500 for the base unit. The reviews seemed amazing for such a cheap little box and Victoria settled in to using it for gaming with no problems – nothing to update, no crashing – silent, fast and it just works!

My own Windows PC also started blue-screening so, after extensive research to work out the feasibility, I got myself the mid-priced £900 one, with 512GB SSD and 24GB RAM. It’s still a fairly tight spec with too few ports (I need outputs for 2x screens) and storage (I want 1-2TB storage) for my usual needs but with a UGREEN dock it covered everything. There was a small hic-up with the DisplayPort connector on the dock, which needs an Active cable if you want to terminate at an HDMI or DVI port on the screen, but with that cable it works fine.

There also seemed to be good software that covered my needs: Microsoft 365, OneDrive/SharePoint, NordVPN, Brave browser, Plex, Thunderbird email, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, Visual Code & Teams BUT … no Microsoft Access for MacOS. I use Access every day for work so it would have been a big problem not to have it but I kept my old PC so it was still possible to run it on that. 

There is usually a way round anything these days and in this case the recommended route is to run Windows11 on a Virtual Machine but I’d read that you still need an ARM 64-bit version of Windows11 and there was conflicting information – some saying Access might run on it but others saying it categorically wouldn’t.

I tried a few VMs like Oracle Virtual Box and UTM but they all had problems – until I tried VMWare Fusion. VMWare Fusion is free for personal use but Broadcom make it incredibly difficult to download – see this and other tutorials online. You know a website is badly structured when you need a tutorial to find what you want! Anyway, once installed it’s quite easy to install various Linux distros and there is even an easy option to just install a Windows11 VM. Once that went down I connected my account and downloaded Microsoft 365, which to my great surprise, contained Access! What’s more, it worked on my database and runs the VBA modules perfectly with no modification. I’m using OneDrive to send files in and out of the VM with ease. 

So, I just wanted to say that, if you go for a Mac Mini M4 and absolutely need some Windows software then there is a solution. Go for VMWare Fusion and it’ll just work fine!