One should try to use the same version of Access if one wants to share a database. However this is not always possible.

Note that if you are using an earlier version of Access, then one can convert to a later version (see notes on converting from Access 2 to Access 97), but if you are using a later version you can not directly convert to an earlier version. In other words, there is no downwards compatibility, only upwards compatibility.

The following instructions assume that you have Access 97 open (the instructions for Access 95 will be very similar).

• Highlight the first table in the list
• Select from the File Menu, Save As/Export
• Select from an external database or file
• Choose file of type mail-merge and select Export. A file called of type txt will be created. The first line will hold the field names.
• Do this for each table
• Look at the relationships between each table, so that you can repeat them on other version of Access

• Open Wordpad
• Type in the name of the query into Wordpad
• Highlight the first table in the list and choose Design

• Select View SQL from the View menu
• Copy the query into the clipboard
• Switch to Wordpad and paste the query
• Copy and paste each query into Wordpad
• Save as a text file

• Open Wordpad
• In Access 97, open the first form and press Print Screen
• In Wordpad, press Paste. This will give a screen dump of the form to remind you of its appearance
• Do this for each form
• In Access 97, select Documentor from the Tools/Analyze menu and select all the Forms and print

• Open Wordpad
• In Access 97, open the first report and press Print Screen
• In Wordpad, press Paste. This will give a screen dump of the report to remind you of its appearance
• Do this for each report
• In Access 97, select Documentor from the Tools/Analyze menu and select all the Reports and print

• Create a new database
• Select Import from the File menu and import all the tables
• Add the relationships
• Create a new query, but instead of adding any tables, select Close and press the SQL button.
• clear SELECT DISTINCTROW;
• Open the query text file using Notepad and copy the first query
• Paste the query into the SQL area
• Save it as the original name
• Copy and paste all the other queries
• Theforms and reports will all have to be created again using the documentor output as an aide-memoire.