Hello All,
I've got something of a sticky problem here and am at a loss how to fix it. I'm trying to help a co-worker in another group with something. He has an Access 97 DB that was developed years ago by someone who was laid off years ago. It badly needs some cleanup and some updates to something more modern. The original author left my friend with admin capability, but he's not really good with DB programming. The most recent problem has been that he can no longer add users. He was able to do so before, but the last few people he has tried to add are not appearing in the users list.
This has kind of become the last straw. He has used some of the other tools that I have created (split db with access 2010. Users just get a front end .accdr file) and he would like to get things moving in that direction. The primary problem is that the user level security features have made it impossible to migrate the DB from access 97 to anything more recent. We cannot find any sort of .mdw file. We can't seem to be able to take out the security either. We have tried creating a blank db and importing everything into 2003 but we end up with a bug filled mess. Most of the tables come over. maybe half of the queries import. almost none of the forms came across clean. The queries that do give me issues that make me think there is a problem with relationships being screwed up.
So is there something that we can do to get things at least moving in the right direction without having to re-engineer everything from scratch? The tools I have available are Access 97, access 2003 (which cannot open the DB because of permissions errors), and Access 2014. Our IT department is outsourced, in another country, and absolutely clueless when it comes to issues that are not listed in their call script. Our machines may or may not be able to download outside tools, and we aren't supposed to use anything not explicitly approved by IT.
I suspect the first key is going to be disabling the security measures. After that we should be able to keep people able to work in the db while we set up some sort of migration path that does not require re-writing a ton of queries, forms, and reports.