Lotus Approach Conversion (Access 2K)

Topic

New Reply

Greetings all:

I was asked recently by one of my clients to investigate converting their Lotus Approach Database Application to MS Access. Lotus Approach consists of .dbf and .dbt tables among other things. The .dbf tables are relatively easy to convert, similar to dbase. The .dbt’s are contrary and Access has no way to recognize a .dbt when an import is done. The .dbt tables are similar to the many side of a one-to-many relationship set-up in Access. What I was able to do was to convert the .dbt to a text file, via Notepad and Wordpad, however, the foreign key remained encrypted. Has anyone had any experience converting Lotus Approach to Access and if so, would you mind sharing your expertise. TIA.

Reply | Quote

Replies

I haven’t event looked at Approach for years, but you should be able to save the tables from Approach to a format that Access can read instead of trying to do it all from outside. That should simplify the conversion. Are you sure the dbt files are tables and not relationships?

Reply | Quote

The .dbt files are tables that contain notes, aka, memo fields in Access. The only way I was able to see what was in them was to convert them to a text file. This allowed me to view the contents of the notes, however, the matching ID field for the .dbf was garbled and not readable. Therefore, I can’t match the notes with the main. Was hoping someone knew about the format of the .dbt file and how to interpret the ID.

Reply | Quote