Updating Office - Will it break my VB Programs

Todate All my programs have been written using VB6 SP5 and use Access 97 MDBs to store my data as well as the othe Office products through office automation such as Word Excel and Outlook.

We are contemplating upgrading our office suite to either Office 2000 (if it can still be purchased anywhere) or Office XP. What are the implication for me as I try to maintain our current VB programs as well as developing future ones? Anyone had any experience here that they can share.

Thanks,
Rev. Michael L. Burns

ur VB6sp5 apps using access97 should not have any problems coexisting with office2000... as long as u keep the db's as access97 dbs :)

when it comes to the automaiton part however, I'm not sure all the functions used in those *.olb files (the once u reference when opening Excel, word.....) will be backward compatible...

Hi again, if u have a small test app, I can run it on my pc,( I have the config. u want to change to... )

There will be no problem outputting to Office 2000 instead of 97, you may have to reference different libraries (eg: "Excel 9.0 Object Library" instead of 8.0), but the code will be exactly the same.

The only trouble is in going backwards (as new functions are made available in later versions of office).

Like peet said using Access 97 with it should be fine, depending on how you access the database you might be ok upgrading access too (if that's what you want to do)

Peet and Si_the_geek,


Thank you both for your relplies. We're not sure if we want to go to Office XP or not since we're not sure what that will buy us. We don't do a lot of online type of stuff and it seems that a lot of the inprovements in XP are geared to the web. We're leaning to Office 2000 if it can still be purchased.

I tested our applications on an Office 2000 equipped machine this morning and they all seemed to work ok. However, if I converted the MDBs to Access 2000 and reran the application all but one came back with an "Unrecognizable Database Format" error. The one that still ran ok was witten using the dataenvironment.

Pastor Mike

u will have to change u'r references to DAO 3.6 think thats all...

I had the same error "Unrecognizable Database Format" when upgrading to Access 2000.
If you are using data controls all what you have to do is to change connect property of the data control to Access 2000 instead of Access.

Reem,

That did the trick.

Thanks

One of our clients updated to Office XP and part of our program
didn't work.
turned out to be a simple oversite where XP defaults were
different from 97 and 2000 defaults...
Our fault for depending on that, but just be aware...

The automation process works fine and we haven't seen
any other problems.

JPicasso

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.

Pastor Mike