Benefits of Access 2003:
1. *Every* time you open your database in Access 2003, you are presented
with a series of dialog boxes that advise you not to use your program,
because it may be unsafe. There are 3 or 4 dialogs, some that you have to
scroll to read all the text, and find the question you are actually
answering. If you accept the default answer in any of these dialogs, you are
thrown back out, i.e. your file does not open.
The recommended solution is for your company to shell out money buying a
digital certificate to let you open your own database, and of course you
have to keep buying the certificate every year. If you are an individual you
cannot get a certificte. If you make even minor changes to your database
(such as changing an action query), you must go through the process of
signing it again, and there several related problems with constantly
changing a signed database.
The not-recommended solution is to set the Macro Security to Low, so Access
2003 behaves like Access should and like the previous versions do that do
not have this problem. (You can also avoid some of the dialogs by
sacrificing functionality.)
2. Access 2003 will not run on Windows 98 or ME. (All previous versions do.)
3. Access 2003 contains nearly all the bugs that are in previous versions,
including sorting failures, comparison failures, lots of problems with
filters in forms and reports, corruptions caused by Name AutoCorrect, and so
on. More details:
http://allenbrowne.com/tips.html#flaws
4. A2003 contains new bugs and quirks, such as themed controls,
incompatibility with the way subform controls were referenced in previous
versions, problems with network printers, ...
5. The new features in A2003 generally don't work as advertised. For
example, it promises that it can track object dependencies, but to do that
requires Name AutoCorrect to be turned on. My last attempt to work with this
(in a database that had queries into tables that no longer existed) caused
at least 8 crashes (A2003 shut down by Windows) in one hour (with repairs
and restarts in between), so IME it is completely unusable.
6. Once you know all the bugs and how to configure A2003, it is actually
possible to get a setup that crashes less often during development then
A2000 and A2002.
7. It is easier to find things in the Help File in A2003.
