John,

Sorry to be so slow in getting back to you; obviously other Loungers have come to your rescue!

Here’s a brief accounting of my experience with the Access 2003 to 2007 transition (so far):

For my applications, we still have a mix of 2003 (less and less) and 2007 (more and more) users (who need access to the same database). To MS’s credit, this has been surprisingly painless. Of course, you have to retain the 2003 database format (.mdb) which 2007 handles satisfactorily. If you have a “buttoned-up” application (custom menu bar, database window inaccessible, etc.), Access 2007 will open the database in near 2003-look-alike format (your menu only, no ribbons, etc.). There are a few annoyances — macro/VBA security has to be dealt with when opening the database (which can be foreign to the users) — this can be dealt with by setting up trusted sites. The dead close button mentioned in this thread is annoying (I haven’t looked yet at some of the resources Wendell and Hans have suggested). On forms with list boxes, the highlighted list box entry tends to only be outlined rather than highlighted with a different background color, but this may have something to do with my VBA coding behind the form — but it does behave differently than 2003 which is an annoyance. I do use user-level security for some of my databases which works fine (again, I have retained the .mdb database format for backwards compatibility).

I have started doing development work on the .mdb databases in Access 2007, and haven’t encountered any significant problems (the biggest hurdle is getting used to the new interface); there seem to be lots of new form/control/report properties — I’m leary of how these will work for those remaining Access 2003 users, so I am avoiding them for now. Fortunately, the VBA Editor has retained it’s “classic” format, so there is no learning curve there. The biggest challenge may well be maintaining/ revising my custom menus (I haven’t had to deal with this yet using Access 2007) as Access 2007 does not have an interface for customizing menus and toolbars. They have to be maintained using VBA/Macros as described in some of the links provided by other loungers in this thread.

Once everyone is off Access 2003, it will probably make sense to bite the bullet and convert the menus/toolbars to ribbons (another learning curve, particularly since some of my applications dynamically change the content in the menus), revamp the user-level security to fit the security philosophy behind Access 2007 (I’m still ignorant on this — any good resources out there?) as user accounts/user permissions are absent from the new .accdb database format (as I understand it). It will also make sense to convert the .mdb up to .accdb (which may have to be done anyway to accommodate some of the above changes) and then deal with any other inconsistencies between the two formats. I guess I would rather spend my time adding to the capabilities of my applications, but I guess we have to move on. Of course, Access 2007 may well enable additional capabilities (e.g., RTF format for text/memo fields) that wouldn’t be possible (or at least as easy) in Access 2003. Keeps life interesting…

Regards,