Compatibility? (W98, Acc97)

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I recently sent a version of an Access97 db to someone in another state who has Access 2002. He claims that he cannot open the db with 2002. Is there some upward incompatibility here or some trick to this? I thought Access2000 and 2002 could open and run any application developed on Access97.

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Was it an MDE? As I recall those don’t convert (you have to convert the corresponding MDB and then make a new MDE).

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Nope! I sent two mdb files, one front end (programs) and one back end (data).

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If they haven’t convert the database and the mdb are not at the same place as on your HD, they will not be able to relink the tables. If the path is exact the same they should be able to open the db’s.

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Thanks Francois,

I advised them where to put the mdb’s so that the link would work, so I hope they did that. Their complaint, so far, is that they cannot open the files which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I will have to work closer with them to find out exactly what they are doing. Also, I’m trying to find someone nearby who has 2002 and could do the conversion for me. Then I can send the converted files.

Thanks again,

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I haven’t 2002 but 2000. If you want I convert them to 2000, send me the files(Compact and repair before sending and if possible, zipped). My email is in my profile.

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Is your database a secured database? If so, did you send them the System.mdw file? If not, that can cause a message that says they don’t have permission to open the file.

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It is not secured, but thanks for the suggestion it might be handy in the future.

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If I’m not mistaken, Access 2000 and later versions use Unicode data storage, whereas previous versions did not. I believe this makes earlier versions completely incompatible with later versions.

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Access 2000 has no trouble opening Access 97 database, unicode notwithstanding.

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Here’s a brief explanation of Unicode:

WHAT IS UNICODE?
Unicode (UCS-2 ISO 10646) is a 16-bit character encoding that contains all of the characters (216 = 65,536 different characters total) in common use in the world’s major languages, including Vietnamese. The Universal Character Set provides an unambiguous representation of text across a range of scripts, languages and platforms. It provides a unique number, called a code point (or scalar value), for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The Unicode standard is modeled on the ASCII character set. Since ASCII’s 7-bit character size is inadequate to handle multilingual text, the Unicode Consortium adopted a 16-bit architecture which extends the benefits of ASCII to multilingual text.

Unicode characters are consistently 16 bits wide, regardless of language, so no escape sequence or control code is required to specify any character in any language. Unicode character encoding treats symbols, alphabetic characters, and ideographic characters identically, so that they can be used simultaneously and with equal facility. Computer programs that use Unicode character encoding to represent characters but do not display or print text can (for the most part) remain unaltered when new scripts or characters are introduced.

The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys, and many others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, offers significant cost savings over the use of legacy character sets. It allows data to be transported through many different systems without corruption.

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