Argh! Office 2003 Frustration: Well, you may or may not know that it’s not easy to create a report for a cross-tab query in Access. Access is a useful database for small projects, but I generally prefer something much more robust with PostgreSQL being my personal favorite (free and robust). Well, one of my customers has me working on their access database and the report they wanted required a cross-tab. In order to get all of their features, I had to write a module that generates a report in Excel that displays the cross-tab and then generates some formulas to show the penetration of the products mentioned. By this I mean the average where product sales for a region was >$1.

I get it done, it looks and works beautiful (albeit very slow) and I’m right on schedule. Perfect, right? nope. Turns out, they just decided to upgrade to Office 2003 and although my program works great in Office 2000 and 2002/XP it doesn’t work right at all in 2003. I checked the security settings, which are much more stringent by default, but that doesn’t fix anything. Basically, the errors are that the method or property isn’t suppported in Excel. Of course, I don’t own Office 2003 so I’ve either got to go buy it or come up with another solution. I think “other solution” is the answer, cause they’ve really outgrown access for this project. Maybe I’ll throw some dollars towards MS and move them up to SQL Server, maybe I’ll move them to a different product all together…

Funny thing is, I’ve looked all over the MSDN website and there’s no mention of the changes that I can find. Frustrating.