I'm a university student summer intern at a government agency, so sorry if this comes off as a dumb question or if I don't appear very knowledgeable, but our team of maybe 10-ish people uses an excel spreadsheet currently to store records of forms submitted by contractors, and in order to save time and make it easier to enter records, I made a very simple Access desktop database, with 5 identical forms for entering/editing records from years 2015-2019, and five tables to where the records go after being entered in the form.
My boss and I were both very happy with the Access database I made, and it was working perfectly the entire time I was using it. The trouble comes when I try uploading the Access database file to our Sharepoint 2016 Server. When I click our old excel document, or any other word or powerpoint file, I can edit them as I please then click save and they automatically sync to sharepoint. With my access desktop database however, it just downloads the file onto the computer of whoever clicked the link and then you have to not only edit it, but save it onto your computer and reupload to sharepoint in order to have your changes saved.
I've been looking all over the web for answers, and it seems that Microsoft has retired Access web apps, which is why clicking the database automatically downloads the file, instead of just opening it in browser as it does with excel and word etc.
Since I'm working in the government, I have no admin privileges or anything on our sharepoint server, and I am unable to even add access apps to sharepoint if they still exist (I have no clue), but I am almost positive that there has to be a way to have a collaborative database on our sharepoint server, so that we can all go in and edit/add to it when we need to.
I was really hoping someone would outline precisely what I need to do, as I have only had this job for about a month and I am still getting used to sharepoint/databases/SQL. All I need is a way to get my Access Desktop Database onto our sharepoint server where all our other collaborative documents are, and have the ability to edit from within sharepoint, without having to download and reupload the desktop database every single time. Thanks so much in advance!