Deploying your application on systems that do not have Access installed

Deploying your application on systems that do not have Access installed

In order to able to install your application on another user's computer, you need to ensure that they have Access installed. If they don't, and are not able to get hold of an extra licence for Access, then you will need to use the Developer Edition Tools. This will allow you to install a 'run-time' version of Access onto their machine.

You must make sure that you obtain and use the correct version of the Developer's Tools, as each version of Access has its own version:

Access Version Developer's Version

Access 2.0 Access Developer's Toolkit 2.0 (ADT)

Access 95 Access Developer's Toolkit, version 7.0

Access 97 Office97 Developer's Edition (ODE)

Access 2000 Microsoft Office Developer (MOD)

Access 2002 Office XP Developer

Note that you will probably only be able to buy the last version in shops, as Microsoft withdraw the older versions when a new one is released. You may be able to downgrade from XP to A2K, following these steps posted at Michael Kaplan's site. Other than that, your best chance of getting hold of an older version is via one of the Internet auction sites.

However, there are certain features that are disabled within a runtime application, and you need to test these before deployment. A list of the differences may be found in either article Q162521 for Access 97 or article Q208730 on the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Additionally, due to licencing restrictions, you cannot install all of the components that you would be able to use if there were a full installation of Office on the target computer. For example, you cannot redistribute the Office Assistant or Spell-Checker. You can find a list a files that can be redistributed for the Office 97 Developer's Edition in article Q163535 on the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

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Last modified at 06/06/2006 14:58:06