Opening Access files without Access?

BossArky

Hi, anyone know of any software I can use to open an access database without having access installed on the pc? Thanks.

subway

http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/prodinfo/trial.mspx

download a free trial?

hmm,
cd only now.
sorry

Capt'n Midnight

You can purchase a M$ add on to Office that allows you to generate standalone Access reports so people can run them without needing Access.

I'll try to dig up the links

There is also a thing called snapshot viewer but won't read mdb's

Ginger

See if you can get a copy of access runtime.. but i am fairly sure this is limited to MDE files rather than MDB..

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011208861033.aspx

I dont know what the implications of using this for just data viewing

Malafus

http://www.openoffice.org/

It can open Access databases, but there is some.... manipulation that must be done in order to be able edit them.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.programmingmsaccess.com/FAQs/MOD.htm

I am wanting to create some databases with Access 2000 then front end them with some Visual Basic programs. I would like to set this up so that I only need one licensed copy of Access (on a server or workstation?) and I can distribute the vb program on several different workstations.
You can distribute Access database solutions without clients having Access on their workstation by using the runtime version of Access that ships with the Microsoft Access Developer Edition. In fact, you do not need vb to achieve this. There are separate runtime editions for Access 2000 and Access 2002. Since you plan to distribute your solutions to clients who will not have Access on their workstation, you might as well use Access 2002 to get the extra functionality afforded by the latest version of the product. You can got a more comprehensive view of the benefits of MOD at http://www.programmingmsaccess.com/Contests/MODXPReview.htm.

LOL - it's not just tech support jobs that are going to the sub-continent.

Oh and very important, which version of Access as there are a few minor inconsistancies between the various version.

pdogs

If you simply want to access the data then you can import the data by running a new query on the database from within Excel. You will thus get the data in spreadsheet form but no forms or reports.

BossArky

Thanks for the replies folks. In the end the clients IT dept managed to get their act together and installed Access, so didn't need the viewer in the end. Cheers.