In the last month or so I seem to be dealing with the same issue over and over again. I will get a call or email from a company saying that their Access program has stopped working or is having issues.

Here are some examples:

1) A program that has been working for almost ten years with no issues suddenly couldn’t automatically export to Excel.

2) Another program that has been working over ten years started having problems with data corruption.

3) Update queries stopped working in multiple Access programs. Once again the programs had been working for years with no issues.

These were the solutions:

Issue #1 – It turns out that the IT person (outside company) had made changes to the computer over the weekend. When the user came in on Monday they started having the Excel issue.

Issue #2 – The IT person at this company installed a new server and it also seemed that the ethernet connection was being dropped. They installed a new modem.

Issue #3 – Microsoft created a new update and this was causing the queries in Access to stop working. Microsoft created a fix to download and install.

Obviously there is a pattern here. The client is going to call the Access developer assuming that it is an Access issue. But every time it turned out to be an issue that was caused by something changing either with the setup of the computer or new hardware.

When I get these calls the first thing I always ask is what has changed on the computer recently. Almost every time something has been changed or updated on the computer and that is the cause of the problem. Not the Access program!