Access 2003 VBA Programmer's Reference

A.1. To Convert or To Enable—The Age-Old Question

There are several things to consider when deciding to convert or to enable an application to run with Access 2003. This appendix will describe some of the scenarios and some of the options. But first, it would probably be good to make sure that we are all interpreting the words in the same way. Terms like upgrade, migrate, convert, and enable sometimes seem to be used interchangeably. So, for the purposes of this appendix, we'd like to clarify how they are intended to be used.

• Upgrade: You wisely choose to purchase and begin using Access (Office) 2003. Upgrade does not specify that you have changed the file format of your applications. Upgrade is so often associated with getting a discount when purchasing the application that we'll just leave it at that.

• Migrate: You have some Access applications created in previous versions that you will now convert or enable so that they can be used with Access 2003.

• Convert: The specific process that Access runs to change the database format from one version to another. Obviously, we are going to focus on converting to Access 2003. Converting allows you to work with the database objects and to utilize the features of the specified version of Access.

• Enable: Enabling allows a newer version of Access to open a database created by a previous version of Access, but it does not change the file format. In some situations, the need to have older versions of Access using the database makes enabling the ...