Hello Everybody:

This is my first post in this forum. I have a quick question about ACCESS 2002/2003.

I have developed this small database application for a single user and I want to run this application without opening the ACCESS. As when we double click the .mdb file it launches the application by opening the ACCESS with it.

I will appreciate that if someone could please suggest me how to go around this problem. I thank everyone in advance.

Hello,

You can't read or write to a .mdb file unless you have a version of Access (MSACCESS.exe) running on your system. You have two options:

1. run your .mdb in a fully-enabled version of MSACCESS.exe (your standard Access installation), or

2. run your .mdb in a partially-disabled version of MSACCESS.exe (the Access "run-time" version).

For more details on what the Access run-time version is and how to get it, see:

http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=16590

Access can't compile a .mdb to a Win-32 portable executable file.

HTH,

Bob

You can use VB or some other programming language for the front end as well, but it will still launch the ACCESS.EXE process when you access the data.

If you just want to store data and do all of your functions in a programmed front end, you have many options for storing your data besides Access.

It sounds like you have done something like this and want to use Access for the data storage component. If you are running Access from an EXE that you created in a programming language, then Access will run but won't actually appear on the screen. You might also consider MSDE or SQL Express for the back end for this type of solution.

HTH

mmcdonal

mmcdonal,

I was sure that VB has it's own version of the Jet engine and would therefore be able to access data from an Access DB without the need to have Access on the machine.

Kamal,

I would say you best solution would depend on why you dont want to open Access. If it is just to stop the user from accessing the tables dirrectly and from making changes then you can lock the DB down by making it an MDE application. I would recomend that you keep an unchanged copy first tho because once you convert a file to MDE you cant make changes to it.

Figgis