Should we upgrade

[bapman]

We have a social club of about 500 members and are currently going through some major changes. We have done all our membership records in Access 2000. At this time we are discussing upgrades for our Secretary whom mainly uses Microsoft Office 2000.



Our main Access use is for Membership database, application and renewel forms as well as generating mailing list. There are also a few reports generated from the database.

There have been no updates to our software sense Access 2000 was installed in the beginning of 2001. I have very little experiance with Access or computers in general but may soon be taking over position.

The question is: Are there enugh upgrades to Access to make it worth the expense in purchasing the newest version Of Office for the limited use we make of it.

[orange]

If it's doing what you need and stable, why change?

When you say

There have been no updates to our software sense Access 2000 was installed in the beginning of 2001.

you must be getting regular updates/fixes (automated updates) for your Microsoft software.

[bapman]

from talking to past secretaries it appears that the designated computer and database are never online. And none can remember ever doing an update to Access.

As far as "Why change?", Form the little bit that I have started to work with the database and explore some of the queries, things seem to be; dare I say "clunky". there seem to be many steps in getting different queries to run.

Also at this point we are going through many changes as a group and most all of our forms need to be reworked with need different info than required in the past and fields being moved around on the forms.

As I have said " I am not that experienced with computer system" but it seems like having to go through 6 steps to produce a mailing list is a bit outta touch.

[orange]

Sounds like some design issues, but not anything specific to the version of Access.

[ssanfu]

Sounds like some design issues, but not anything specific to the version of Access.

I'm with Orange... sounds like design issues. Access 2000 works great. Access 2007 & 2010, to me, with the ribbon menus are clunky.

[bapman]

The more I look into the database and needs, I'm see that it may just be formatting issues. When the primary forms were designed that feed the database, they were generated in WORD and everything has to be merged back and forth. It looks like sense we have to make all new forms from scratch it would be best to to that in Access itself for better compatibility. The forms I'm talking about are application and renewal forms for membership in our club.