Moving a MS Access database to a Mac

[HenriJ]

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Novice question: What are the options for moving a Wintel platform's Microsoft Access .mdb database to a Mac platform? What is the difficulty in making such a transfer? Thanks, in advance, for any advice.

 

[Bob Greenblatt]

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Novice question: What are the options for moving a Wintel platform's Microsoft
Access .mdb database to a Mac platform? What is the difficulty in making such
a transfer? Thanks, in advance, for any advice.

The main difficulty is that the Mac does not support Access. You could run
Windows on your Mac in any of several modes. In these cases, there are no
issues at all, just copy the database to the Mac and run access on the
virtual machine. If you do not want to run under a virtual machine, then
there are drivers for Excel so that it can access the ACESS database.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Henri -

Moving the file to a Mac is no problem at all - finding anything that will
allow you to use it natively for anything other than a doorstop, however,
will be impossible Access never has been available on the Mac & there
are no compatible applications. You do have at least two options, though:

Depending on the Mac you can use one of the emulators (Parallels, VMWare
Fusion on Intel Macs) & install Windows plus MS Access. On a fast Mac
w/plenty of RAM you should be able to use Access comparable to a PC. [I do
this on my Macbook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 4GB with acceptable performance as well as
on a Dual 2 Ghz G5, 3.5 GB using VirtualPC 7, but I don't deal with large,
complex Access files.]

The other is to find a suitable Mac-based relational DB program (there are
several to choose from), then export the Access tables as compatible data
files (Text, Excel, dBase, XML, whatever) & Import the data to the new
environment. You can Google to do some research, but some to consider are
FileMaker Pro, MySQL, & 4thDimension.

You didn't really expand on what your needs are so there may be other
considerations in addition to or instead of these options.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Novice question: What are the options for moving a Wintel platform's Microsoft Access .mdb database to a Mac platform? What is the difficulty in making such a transfer? Thanks, in advance, for any advice.

Hi,

You can move the Tables from Access to Microsoft Excel easily.

The queries, reports and input forms will not transfer. They will have
to be re-created from scratch in Excel.

See Using Microsoft Office as a Relational Database
http://www.agentjim.com/MVP/Excel/RelationalOffice.htm

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are independent experts who are not affiliated with Microsoft.


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