Alternative to MS Access

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Hello all, I hope you can help me out.
I've put together a database that contains an amazing amount of information.
It is very useful for a lot of people but there are people that are also
interested in viewing it from time to time. As the need is really on a one
off basis, they have not had Access installed on their PCs.
Is there an alternative to viewing mdbs without having MS Access installed
on one's computer? I've tried Snapshot view but can't get it to run...

Thanks a whole bunch!

C.
 
You can purchase Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005.

That includes the Access Developer Extensions that allow you to package the
application together with a royalty-free run-time version of Access that
users who don't already have Access can install so that they can use the
application. They will not, however, be able to make design changes (i.e.:
changes to forms, reports, code, etc.) to the application (nor to any other
MDBs)

Tony Toews has an introduction to this topic at
http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/developereditionfaq.htm
 
That's good option - I was actually looking for some freeware that could be
downloaded off the internet.
Does that exist?

C.
 
Not as far as I'm aware.

You can get at the data in a Jet database (an MDB file) from virtually any
ODBC-compliant client (such as Excel), but you won't be able to use the
forms, reports or code.
 
C said:
. . . I've tried Snapshot view but can't get it to run...
Click to expand...

Snapshot does work. That would let you create reports that could be _viewed_
by other users who did not have Access installed. It is not intended to
allow interactive use of the Access database, and each user would, of
course, have to download and install the Snapshor viewer.

If you want to read carefully, and try that again, then report what problems
you encountered, perhaps someone could help you with the specific problems.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP
 
Interesting. It allows the user to browse and edit tables and queries. It
does not provide access to forms. Not sure about reports. There's a menu
called 'Access' with a single item called 'Open Report'. I'm not sure yet
what that command it is supposed to do. So far it just raises an error about
Access being unable to open a database because it is opened exclusively.

I would not describe this program as an 'alternative to Microsoft Access',
but it could certainly be useful in a situation where you might want to
browse and possibly edit data in an MDB on a PC that does not have Access
installed. It's a single EXE, and requires no installation provided MDAC is
already installed on the PC, so could be a useful tool for trouble-shooting
purposes.
 
cheap bastard.. don't purchase Excel & Word & Outlook and all that
other crap.. just buy Access

-Aaron
 
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