How to open an access database with file extension other than .mdb

[Guest]

How could I open an access database with file extension other than .mdb?
Ex: I renamed a access database "data.mdb" to be "data.asp".
It seemed that the Access 2003 would check the file extension and show me
the error message.
How can I force the Access 2003 to open this database?

 

[Rick B]

Why did you rename it?

I suppose you could try to right-click the file and then select "Open
With..." and then select Access. In Windows Explorer, you can set which
program is used to open particular file types. Not sure I would recommend
changing file extensions. Others would not have any idea what this file is.

Rick B

 

[Guest]

Rick,
Thanks for your reply.
Of course, I knew how to open it with the Windows Explorer but the Access
2003 would show me the message "You are trying to open an unidentified
HTML....."
It is the web page database for the ASP. Usually we changed the database
filename to xxx.asp for the security concern. It can prevent the hacker to
download this database.

Simon

"Rick B" ：

 

[Dirk Goldgar]

Rick,
Thanks for your reply.
Of course, I knew how to open it with the Windows Explorer but the
Access 2003 would show me the message "You are trying to open an
unidentified HTML....."
It is the web page database for the ASP. Usually we changed the
database filename to xxx.asp for the security concern. It can prevent
the hacker to download this database.

Interesting. If you use a nonassociated extension, like ".xyz", Access
opens the file without complaining. At least, Access 2002 does. And if
you use an extension that is associated with a program, but not one of
the file types that Access thinks it knows how to open (not in the
choices of file types that appear in the File Open dialog), then also
Access opens it without complaining. But if Access thinks it knows what
to do with this file type, it gets upset if the file doesn't conform to
its expectations. That's reasonable, but I didn't know it would work
that way.

Simon, can you use some other extension than ".asp"? I found, for
example, that I can rename a database to the ".bmp" extension, and still
open it as a database using the Access File Open dialog.