I have developed a database in 2003 for my work, but would now like to work on it in 2007 as I have just received at home. Will there be problems if I work on the database in 2007 while it continues to be used in 2003 ?
Overall, it should work but be prepared for a few possible headaches. First, this resource may help answer some questions as to how to find things that you're used to:
http://accessjunkie.com/faq2007.aspx
The particular things that frustrate me the most:
1) You can get your toolbars working again with a few setting changes:
http://accessjunkie.com/faq_31.aspx
However, you can no longer modify them graphically! You were able to just drag items or create new menus and so on with a few clicks that now need to be modified either by code or 3rd party tools. If you have 6 or 7 menu items with 6-10 selections each, be prepared for a lot of difficulty.
2) Exporting reports to Excel. Whoops...Microsoft removed this ability. Their work-around is to "just" create the corresponding code to export the table or query. That's fine if your database has 2 or 3 reports but if you have 40 reports and you want to be able to export any of them as needed, you're out of luck. Of course the nice grouping and totalling is gone if you do this as well unless you're into writing piles of code to do something you USED to be able to do with one click.
3) Filters. One thing that seems to have changed is how you refer to your combo boxes or whatever provides the filter data. I haven't seen this documented anywhere but I found it to be a problem.
For example:
In the past if you had a combo box (cboLastName) that you drop down to see everyone in your table whose name is Charlie:
Me.Form.Filter = "firstname= forms!frmMyForm!cboFirstName"
After people getting Access 2007, I found that this stopped working. Must have made a lot of people smile that the program they've been using for 8 years stopped working.
What I found you have to do now is use quotes:
Me.Form.Filter = "Firstname = """ & forms!frmMyForm!cboFirstName & """"
There may be other things to be aware of but these are so far the ones I encountered. Aren't you glad you "Upgraded"? Look on the bright side - tabs don't flash anymore like in Access 2003!
SHADOW
