Access 97 Security

Much as it pains me to say it, I've been tasked with putting some security on a verrrrrrrrrrrry old Access 97 database that our users cobbled together about a decade ago. There are some basic user accounts and such, but it seems that no matter what security level someone has, if they hold down [Shift] while opening the database they are able to see all the tables, queries, code etc, and make changes there if they want to. As you can imagine, this has not gone down well with the auditors.

My main question is: is there a way of overriding this [Shift] behaviour?

Incidentally, they seem fairly amenable to moving the back-end data to SQL Server. However, I'm a little concerned that this will cause problems with the barrel-loads of macros and VBA code that update various tables. An upgrade to, say, Access 2003 seems more feasible but I don't know whether that would be of any help. It's been a long, long time since I used Access (in fact, back when Access 97 was new!) so this has come as a bit of a shock to the system.

Any advice would be appreciated...

Take a copy of your Access97 and place it in a nice safe folder where if you totally screw it up, it won't matter.

Then, try to upgrade that copy to Access 2003. If that goes OK, then run it a bit and see if everything seems to work the way it always has.

If that works OK, then move the new Access 2003 version out to a test platform, and let the actual users have at it for a bit.

There is a way to disable the Shift behaviour, but it is easy to find a basic macro (or mini program, etc) to do it - so anyone can undo it easily.

The other security features of Access 97 are very poor too (eg: I've got 6 lines of VB/VBA code here that can break the password!), so I would definitely agree with Hack's suggestion of moving away from it asap.

Yep, that's what I'm trying to do at the moment. Does that [Shift] behaviour not hold true in Access 2003, then?

I don't know I'm afraid, I don't have any experience of front-ends in recent versions of Access.

Consider yourself lucky, Si... ;)

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Originally Posted by si_the_geek

The other security features of Access 97 are very poor too (eg: I've got 6 lines of VB/VBA code here that can break the password!), so I would definitely agree with Hack's suggestion of moving away from it asap.

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LOL... I second that - A97's security is laughable; we used to say "what security?!"... :lol:
Move away from it as soon as possible - tell them to get SQL Express. It could be an easy sell because it's free (as you know) and can handle a lot more.