Access 2002 and Access 2000

[lgvelez]

I need to purchase Office XP Developers Kit (as a personal investment ... I am working for a company doing many layoffs). Is anyone working in an Access 2000 world doing development using Access 2002? I am a bit fearful about going to eBay to buy an Office 2000 DK, and they cost almost as much as the new office dk. How compatible are the two systems?
TIA,
Laura Laura Velez, MCP
lauravelez@home.com

 

[number2]

Great question. I am considering what has been called the Access 2002 Developers Edition, in order to develop runtime applications. I am however unable to even locate such a product, even at the MS site. There is an Office XP dev. Edition, but apparently no MS Access Dev Edition.

 

[Lightning]

The Developer Tools which make up the "Developer Edition" only come with MS Office, so you would need to buy the bundle, not just Access to get the Developer.

I bought the XP Developer edition about a month ago. Basically, XP is "Version 2" of Office 2000. That is, 2000 with some additional features and tweaks. So the compatibility between the two is quite good. You can also convert back from XP to 97 without major difficulties as well.

HOWEVER, as I said, I only bought it about a month ago, so there may be issues that I haven't come across yet.

But if you are looking to learn and be self-sufficient in case of a lay-off, my advice would be to get XP rather than 2000. Most of the companies/government departments that I have contracted with have stayed with 97, and have no intentions of upgrading to 2000. When they do upgrade, they will go to XP (or even the next edition, whatever that may be). So it makes sense to get the most current version now for longevity, that will also allow that backwards compatibility.

HTH

Lightning

 

[lgvelez]

I really appreciate the advice. I was wondering if 2002 was more stable than 2000. Laura Velez, MCP
lauravelez@home.com

 

[scking]

That's a very difficult question to ask on this type forum. What do you mean by more stable? Many times individual system configuration problems can cause instability but not be related to the Access products. I have had the current versions of Access for development since 1.0 so I have experienced each one. No major stability problems have occurred but when I tried to put multiple versions of Access on the system some problems occurred which we documented on the Microsoft knowledgebase. Maybe some magazine article could be found to discuss this issue.

Steve King Growth follows a healthy professional curiosity