Access Versions?

[RaptorRaptur]

Hi, I've been using Office Pro 2003 for many years. Now its time to make a change. I am not interested in 365. I am mainly developing for small networked systems using the Jet as a backend. However the latest project I'm working on will need to go SQL for the backend.
I woul;d like some opinions as to best Access to choose.

 

[CJ_London]

Probably 2010 32bit, I would give 2007 a miss. On another thread you mention you are using XP, I don’t know but this might have an impact on your decision

 

[AHeyne]

Choose one which still receives security updates from Microsoft. That are Microsoft Office 2021, 2024 and 365.

 

[RaptorRaptur]

What are the Plus and Minus points of Access 2024?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The minuses for any upgrade as massive as Ac2003 ==> Ac2024 would be finding a list of all the deprecated features, thinks you cannot do with Access any more.

The pluses would be all the code fixes that have occurred since Ac2003 was current, though those changes could ALSO be minuses if the "fix" blocked something that Ac2003 SHOULD have - but DID NOT - block. Finding that list might be a Google search or even a Google Gemini search.

 

[AHeyne]

@RaptorRaptur :
This maybe could help you for your 'feature' decision: Microsoft Access Version Features and Differences Comparison Matrix

One major plus of 2024 compared to 2021 is the Microsoft Support (including the mentioned security updates):
- Office 2021 ends 2026-10-13
- Office 2024 ends 2029-10-09

 

[DickyP]

Just for the record to put things in a slight perspective, I still have 2003 (and 2010) on my old Win 7 laptop working quite happily. On my main PC I'm running 2021 on Win 10 which I moved to when my old HDD (Win 8.1) gave up the ghost. The transition/conversion from 2003 to 2021 databases was very simple but a fair bit of work - not much beyond adding PtrSafe to my Declares.

What I really miss, however is integrated Visual Source Safe. I make do with AccessVCS and other tools but they aren't the simple complete solution that VSS was.

Also the IDE in 2021 (indeed from 2010 onwards) is unnecessarily more complicated than 2003, albeit liveable with once I got used to it.

The one advantage I really like with 2021 is purely cosmetic - the ability to combine pictures and text on buttons.

And the icing on the cake is that 2003 still has the old style (more coherent) MsgBox - and yes I realise this is a mterer of taste, but I like my message boxes to match my forms.