Running macros without opening Access

[howardnl]

Is it possible to run a macro without opening Access? What I need to is create a delimited text file without opening the database. I'm not sure of the best way to do this. Thanks for any help.

 

[Atomic Shrimp]

I don't think there's any way of running an access macro externally, you could run it in a database of it's own with the tables linked in. Why don't you want to open the database?

 

[howardnl]

I am relatively new to Access so I'm not sure if macros are the way to go, but it was one thouhgt I had. I do database programming and some software my company just purchased stores data in Access. Somehow I need to get portions of that data into a Progress database. The way it is currently done is the new data is saved to a file and then sucked into Progress. The new software uses Access and it would be best to keep the end user out of Access. I thought I could just use the old program that sucks in the file by creating a file from Access. I hope that makes sense. Thanks for any help.

 

[Atomic Shrimp]

In this case I would probably go the following route:
-Create a separate Access Database with links to all of the relevant tables.
-Set up either an 'autoexec' macro, or a form that opens on startup
-Do your queries/exports in the macro/form
-Make sure that at the end of the macro, you have the 'Quit' command (or 'DoCmd.Quit' in VBA)
-When you are happy that it works, create an MDE from it (this will prevent users tampering with the macro etc, but make sure that you keep a copy of the original MDB yourself)

You might also want to look at security options and hiding tables.

HTH

Mike

 

[Pat Hartman]

I have never heard of Progress but if it is a product similar to Access it may support reading Access tables directly or support the use of ODBC drivers. In either case you can write code in the Progress database to import the data from the Access database. Alternatively, if Progress supports OLE or DDE you can use those methods to extract data from an Access database.