Can you late bind access if access is not installed (1 Viewer)

CJ_London

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probably a silly question. My guess is no but thought worth asking in case anyone has been faced with this situation.

Background: I have a new client who uses office 365 (all users). There are a number of users who (perhaps) do not have Access installed but want to regularly refresh some data in excel spreadsheets (primarily lookup tables).

They do have 'line of sight' across the LAN to the folder where the access backend is installed and my thinking was they could run an Excel macro to open an instance of access and extract the data.

Alternative is to use ADO, but again, not sure if ODBC would include the Access driver if Access not installed.

All depends on what gets installed when Office 365 is installed. The client has a substantial IT dept with the usual long winded method for getting anything considered, let alone done and the project has a go-live across 26 countries in two weeks time.

What I don't know is if the 365 installation includes the access library dll, even if Access itself is not installed. In total there are around 60 users who do not have access installed (or to be more precise, they don't use it so don't know!)

I don't have a setup that does not include Access (and to uninstall may still leave stuff behind) to test the scenario. I can test on the user machines but this will take time and I would prefer to go in knowing the answer rather than suggesting a possible solution that doesn't work out.

I have a workaround - basically maintaining a master excel file from access which users copy across when required, but not very satisfactory long term.

A better alternative is to replace the Excel 'front end' with an Access one but this is a longer term solution, no way can it be completed and test in the available two weeks.

So to summarise, can anyone confirm one way or the other whether an Office 365 installation will automatically include the access dll and/or driver?
 

isladogs

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No I can't tell you the answer .... but why not just test it on a new VM?
 

CJ_London

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why not just test it on a new VM?
Hadn't thought of that - I'll give it a try. I don't have 365 but the principle should still hold
 

Dreamweaver

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I use office 365 but sorry to say I don't know, there is a tool you can use to completly remove office 365 as I had to do that due to an install error.
 

Pat Hartman

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Access is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. It is NOT a database engine. Jet and ACE are the local database engines typically confused with Access.

For Excel to use "Access" data, they do NOT need to have Access installed at all. They do need to have ACE installed (it is a free download). Then Excel can use ODBC to link to Jet/ACE databases.
 

CJ_London

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thanks Pat - I was referring to accessing the ACE backend and I know Access is a RAD tool, I bang on enough about it myself - So hoist by my own petard:eek:

got carried away with the odbc driver name - which is called access.
 

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