Running Access 2013 front end with 2003 backend

[Moss100]

Hello, I have an application that uses Access 2003 to store its data - the access database part of the application contains tables only.

We are upgrading to access 2013 on machines and I wonder will I have any problems linking front end databases written in 2013 to the backend (table only) 2003 database.

Will a 2013 front end run ok with a backend in 2003 that contains only tables?

As it is for business use I am concerned about stability compared with our current set up of 2003 front and back ends which has proven pretty rock solid.

Many thanks. Mark.

 

[lameid]

I've used 2007 and 2010 with 2003 backends with no problem. I would expect it to be fine but I don't know for sure.

Historically this is the case. Noteworthy is that Access 2013 does not support Access 97 databases which are MDB files. So if it doesn't work, try converting to Access 2003 within Access 2003 as it is probably a stray that missed conversion years ago.

Beyond that if felt like 2013 deprecated quite a bit, so that would be a bigger concern... I forget what I was doing but something worked when I wrote it in 2010 but puked in 2013. It was obscure functionality. Anyway that was a year ago so I'm not going to remember the specifics. I still have 2010 at work where I wrote code that bombed on 2013 (almost everything worked).

That said, I might hesitate on using 64 bit versions of office without testing legacy support in a mixed environment. I had an issue using 2010 somewhere with 32 and 64 bit installs and ACDE files (like MDE) before the hotfix was completely rolled out.