Welcome to Microsoft Office Access 2003

Access 2003, the eighth iteration of Microsoft's desktop database management system, is a member of the newly christened Microsoft Office System 2003 and sports a new name Microsoft Office Access 2003. Microsoft Office System 2003 includes the core Office 2003 applications Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The 2003 versions of standalone products, such as FrontPage, Publisher, Visio, and Project, plus the new InfoPath and OneNote applications, also gain Office System membership. On the server side, Windows SharePoint Services formerly SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal Server fall under the Office System 2003 umbrella.

The goal of the new Office System brand is to reposition Microsoft's dominant productivity application suite as software to facilitate collaboration between information workers. For example, Access 2003 can export tables or queries and link tables to or from SharePoint lists. InfoPath form templates can connect to Jet or Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE) databases directly. Another Microsoft Office System goal appears to be encouraging operating system upgrades Office System 2003 will install only under Windows 2000 Professional or Server with Service Pack 3 (SP3), Windows XP Home or Professional, or any Windows Server 2003 version. Windows SharePoint Services run under Windows Server 2003 only. Windows NT, 98, 98SE, and Me users can't use any members of Office System 2003.

Whether Microsoft achieves its lofty goals for Office System 2003 upgrades remains to be seen. The Gartner Group, a well-respected information technology research organization, conducted an informal survey during its October 2002 Symposium/ITxpo. Gartner reported that 31 percent of the companies represented used Office 97, 56 percent ran Office 2000 and only 6 percent had installed Office XP. If Gartner's data is representative of the entire Office installed base, close to 90 percent of Access 2003 users will upgrade from Office 97 or 2000. Thus, this chapter begins with a brief description of new Access 2003 features for Access 2002 users and then covers important changes that affect Access 2000 and 97 users who upgrade to Access 2003.

Tip

If you haven't used an earlier Access version, you might want to skip to the "SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine Setup" section near the end of this chapter. The succeeding chapters of this book cover in detail all the material presented in this chapter, with the exception of initial SQL Server 2000 setup.