Access Database Design and Programming, Second Edition

Installing ADO

We should mention a word about installing ADO. ADO is installed along with Office 2000, but not with Office 97.

To see if you have ADO installed on your system, first open an Access code module and then open the References dialog under the Tools menu. If you see an entry such as the one highlighted in Figure 17.1, you’re all set.

Figure 17-1. Reference to the ADO object library

If, on the other hand, you have no such listing, you might want to do a file search of your hard disk, looking for MSADOxx.DLL. If you don’t have the file, then you can download the required software components from Microsoft’s web site. At the time of this writing, the URL is http://www.microsoft.com/data/mdac2.htm. (If this URL is no longer valid, try searching for ADO or MDAC, which stands for Microsoft Data Access Components.) Note that the small version of the software kit is over 5 MB! Enjoy.

Note also that there is considerable confusion when it comes to versions of ADO, a situation that Microsoft does not seem to want to clarify. Version 2.0 refers to the following items, as reported by the type library itself (or the VBA IDE References dialog box). Note the different version numbers:

• Implementation: msado15.dll

• Object library name: msado15.dll

• Object Library Version: 2.0

• Documentation String: Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects 1.5 Library

• Help File: msado10.hlp

On the other hand, version 2.1 of ...