Microsoft Access is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. It is designed to rapidly develop database related applications and uses the same coding language as Visual Basic and VB .Net. 

Its main strengths are the speed in which database related applications can be developed and its similarity to Visual Basic.

Because Microsoft Access is available as part of the Office suite it is one of the entry points for hobbyist programmers who start to use it because it is readily available on their desktop. Due to this, Access is considered by some to be a weak programming language, but it is not.  Access is a strong database development language with most of the power of Visual Basic and there are thousands of successful commercial applications in the marketplace developed using Microsoft Access.