Upgrading to 2010

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Hello, anybody and everybody. Our company is thinking about switching from Office 2007 to Office 2010 (Professional). What kind of pros and cons have you run into with this switch?

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I’ve been trying it out in 64bit mode. So far I like the speed which comes from the extra memory (8gb in my case). So far the only the only problem is in the change to macros from 2007 to 2010. While the new structure seems to be good long term, it did not convert any of my keyboard macros correctly. Also, not unexpectedly, several add-in products do not yet have their 64bit versions available.
Marty

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I tried 2010 for a week, but the macros did not work correctly, I use around 40 a lot and 50 or so from time to time in Word. I was hoping that there has been some improvement on changing to 2010 or some way to quickly change them to keep from losing productivity. I was wanting to update in particular for PowerPoint, which cost almost as the suite.

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I have had problems with Outlook custom forms that reference a database connection in the vb script. No errors given – they just won’t feed the data from the form to the Access database.

Also – Access Snapshot View is gone, so if you have any exports that use it, they will need to be converted to pdf format.

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Also – Access Snapshot View is gone, so if you have any exports that use it, they will need to be converted to pdf format.

That is actually not completely true. They have removed Snapshot View from the Access interface, but you can still create Snapshots via code.
Of course, the Snapshot Viewer is harder to get.

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I have had problems with Outlook custom forms that reference a database connection in the vb script. No errors given – they just won’t feed the data from the form to the Access database. …

What format is your Access database – .mdb or .accdb? Also what version of Office were the custom forms developed in? If that was done in Office 2007, I would expect it to work in 2010 as well.

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I really like the improvements in 2010. There is nothing I don’t like about it.
I’m using the 32 bit version

Major Likes –
The ease of modifying the ribbon. You can put stuff where you want it.
Printing to PDF
I prefer Backstage to the Office button menu
In Access – The image gallery and no more memory leaks crashing reports with hundreds of images.

Dislikes –
In Access I use Rick Fisher’s Find and Replace alot. It works in 2010 but you get nags about it being A beta version.

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In Access I use Rick Fisher’s Find and Replace alot. It works in 2010 but you get nags about it being A beta version.

I have been getting 4 nags whenever I use Find and Replace with 2010, because my attempts to register my copy were always unsuccessful. Today I realised that I was using the version for 2007 rather than the 2010 version.
So, after downloading the new version I am pleased to be back to 1 nag now.

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Dislikes –
In Access I use Rick Fisher’s Find and Replace alot. It works in 2010 but you get nags about it being A beta version.

I just noticed that in the options for Find and Replace you can turn off the nag message.

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I really like the improvements in 2010. There is nothing I don’t like about it.
I’m using the 32 bit version

Major Likes –
The ease of modifying the ribbon. You can put stuff where you want it.
Printing to PDF
I prefer Backstage to the Office button menu
In Access – The image gallery and no more memory leaks crashing reports with hundreds of images.

Dislikes –
In Access I use Rick Fisher’s Find and Replace alot. It works in 2010 but you get nags about it being A beta version.

Assuming you have a registered version of Find and Replace, I think you just need to register it; you can just ask Rick for the code if you don’t have it.

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Ditto to kentg’s likes. A great product so far (32 bit). (I have no experience of using Rick Fisher’s Find and Replace, so I cannot comment in this regard).

My Rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core CPU; ASUS Cross Hair VIII Formula Mobo; Win 11 Pro (64 bit)-(UEFI-booted); 32GB RAM; 2TB Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. 1TB SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 NVME SSD; MSI GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC; Microsoft 365 Home; Condusiv SSDKeeper Professional; Acronis Cyberprotect, VMWare Workstation Pro V17.5. HP 1TB USB SSD External Backup Drive). Dell G-Sync G3223Q 144Hz Monitor.

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Unless you have a compelling need for the 64-bit version, I would stick with the 32-bit Office 2010. It gets used by a much larger population, so bugs get shaken out much quicker. Our clients run some pretty large Access front-ends and they work well in the 32-bit versions – however if you are running really huge Excel workbooks, then you might find the 64-bit version useful.

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Thanks for your opinions! We would definitely go with 32-bit. Sounds to me like it shouldn’t be a problem.

One thing I have run in to is on our current system (Office 2007 Professional, running frontend on Windows 7 Professional, backend on an SME_Server) it runs very slowly when more than 1 user is using the database. Also, with all the settings for sharing and record-level locking, we still run in to problems now and then with permission issues. I’m hoping that 2010 will take care of that. I’ve pretty much singled it out to one computer (when it is using the database) causing the permission problems, but can’t figure out why as all the settings are the same on every computer.

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What format is your back-end – mdb, accdb or some other server-based back-end? And is the front-end deployed to each of the Win7 workstations?

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Both back-end and front-end are .accdb. Yes, the front-end is deployed to each of the Win7 stations.

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Is it possible that workstation is opening the database in exclusive mode rather than in shared mode? I don’t have much experience with the .accdb format in production environments, as we still have users in older versions of Access that don’t support it. There are some anecdotal reports of problems with .accdb format when converting from .mdb format. Also you might take a look at Tony Toews Access Performance page for some suggestions. Also, do you have SP2 of Access 2007 installed? If not, try it and see if things get better.

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I guess I’m in the minority (what’s new?). I’ve found 2 really big issues with 2010 and a 3rd issue that is just painful and will probably go away eventually:

1) The new macro composition screeen is VERY difficult to work with vs. the equivalent in good old 2007. Before I could create a new macro from an old routine in minutes flat. The old visual presentation was really easy to work with. Resequencing and statement correction was a snap. I could copy and paste, cut and paste to move statements around like I was in Excel. Heck it was easier than Excel. Sigh, those days are GONE. I’ve spend 30 minutes just trying to move the statements I want around. The Else If, Else trickiness in 2010 (which can’t be undone) and inability to move code out of a If/Else nest I often recode statements now. I can’t tell you how often I have wanted to just print out my macro code so I could refer to it to see out I had manged to get my statement order mangled when I tried to add around else to an existing if! The one thing about the new marco compsotion screen that REALLY, REALLY bugs me is that they put the “delete statement” and close (macro) window button within about a 1/16th of an inch of each other and use exactly the same image for each. That was dumb, dumb, dumb (dumb)

The last thing about macros, and I realize I’m sometimes a dim light, but I cannot for the life of me figure out a way to get rid of those hokey triangles that show up about every 2nd or 3rd line within all my macros (whenever a form window is opened or closed for example). What are they supposed to mean? Yes, they there are those nasty little messages that say the commands on these lines are not secure but what does that really mean? More important, how can I get rid of them? These triangles all over the place screw up the code readability such that statements become really hard to follow after a while, for me at least (I’m dyslectic).

2) Context sensative help is a good thing, right? 2007 did a really nice job there. A big improvement from 2003. Well, 2010 doesn’t seem to have ANY context sensative help. At least in the few dozen times I’ve looked. All I get is the main Access online help screen. When I search there all I ever get back is “not found’. (Regarding those nasty little triangles, there’s nothing anywhere about them in Access help that I could find after a wasting more time than I want to admit to.)

3) I crash Access now least a 2-3 times a day, when using filters. Sometimes Access goes away enntirely (without saving files or providing a recovery safety net like we’ve become accustomed with other Office apps) and sometimes the fancy filtered query I’ve just finished coding goes away. It seems to happen mostly with the “contains” clause, either when the result set is empty or too large. (I’m expecting this will go away eventually after MS gets enough crash reports.)

All the above said, I still don’t want to go back to 2007. (I admit that I’ve seriously thought about it though.) There are all kinds of small but welcome improvements and the expanded command list is a big step forward.

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I am using Access 2010 64-bit. I’ve been reading/boning up on differences from earlier Access by reading a couple of the books. They all mention 32-bit references, files, etc – probably just quick rewrites from earlier versions. Are the 64-bit files, etc. available?

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Overall I am disappointed; I find it 10 times slower when connecting to a large sql server. I used the properties to organise my queries, this function has been lost.

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This is an update to my previous post (#12 above) on this subject. Regarding my 3 complaints from last December, things have gotten somewhat better.

Issue #1: I have become more or less comfortable with the macro composition screen. There has been one product change that really helped. I am now able to enter commands anywhere I want and somehow, the click and drag statements functionality seems easier to use now. Those little triangles really bug me though making it harder to read the code. I wish I could get rid of them but there apparently is no way to do that.

Issue #2: I still don’t have context sensative help; which it turns out to be a “feature” in Access 2010. You see, I cannot get the help subsystem to pull up “all help sources” automatically. Instead the help screen defaults when invoked (even when already loaded) to access only the programmers guide help source material. I’ve looked high and low for a setting to change but haven’t found one. My workaround is to change the setting each time I need help and then type in a search agrument to try and find what would have come up directly if there was context sensative help like in prior Access versions. Any help here would be greatly appreciated as I am an entirely self taught Access programmer and this “feature” often slows me down when using syntax I am not familar with.

Issue # 3: Access 2010 doesn’t crash anymore. Hasn’t happened now for at least 90 days. No changes to any of my systems (Windows 7 at home office, XP at office and on laptop I use for volunteer work) other than Microsoft software updates but somehow there are no crashes anymore. Thx you MS for that!

Net-net, now I very strongly prefer Access 2010 over the previous versions I also work with occasionally. Recently I used 2003 and it was painful. There have been many, many improvements, large and small over the past 8-9 years.

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