Hi to the Forum!
This is my first post here and I am looking forward to gaining some new insights for my Access program. The short, quick question is does anyone have any advice or experience deploying an updated Access 2000 to 2003 solution? Are there any 'gotchas' I need to be aware of?

We distribute an Access 2000 form-driven program that is point-and-click user-friendly for people without Access skills. The program is designed to display reports and forms with groups of records or individual records with charts of query-based results filtered by dropboxes or parameter popups.

There are some DAO objects and methods used but no Data Access Pages or ActiveX Data Objects. Through the years we have distributed this program to clients with various versions of Access and even more various versions of Windows and for the most part we have handled everything pretty well. (except for clients with Access 97)

We are MSDN subscribers and have contemplated upgrading our other databases and our program to Access 2003. I have been assigned to test the development and deployment for our program if we develop the file in Access 2003 (using the Access 2000 file structure) and test for any deployment issues during installation.

We include the Access RT components in case someone does not have Access on their PC. This is a stand-alone program and installs the data tables along with the queries, forms, reports, etc in an .MDE file with decent security so the users cannot get to the tables and change any production results.

Currently we use basic queries and some underlying union and crosstab subqueries and we are testing some pivot tables and pivot charts for some new interactive reports.

We have added some code behind command buttons that allows the users to export some data as an Excel file or text files and uses API calls to use the Open/Save Windows dialog box.

I know that Access 2002 and 2003 have a much easier process of calling and using the dialog boxes, but since we will definitely have users that do not have newer versions of Access we will stay with what is working now. Since we have no ADO or DAP will we have anything to be concerned about making the switch?

Thanks,
WhoFan

The only thing I can think of is your users' references. Some of your code uses DAO, which I by default is not selected as a reference in 2003. You will have to select that, and then move it up in the list in order for your DAO code to run. This is why I have changed over to ADO completely.

HTH

mmcdonal