Access® 2010 Bible

Chapter 31. Distributing Access Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Setting options for your current database

• Making sure your application works before you distribute it

• Putting the finishing touches on your application

• Hardening your application

You're lucky if you have the luxury of developing only single-user, in-house applications and you never have to worry about distributing an application within a company or across the country. Most developers have to prepare an Access application for distribution sooner or later. You don't even have to develop commercial software to deal with distribution — when you develop an application to be run on a dozen workstations in one organization, you need to distribute your application in some form or other.

This chapter covers the issues relevant to distributing Access applications. However, because some of these items — such as error handling and splitting tables — are covered in detail elsewhere in this book, this chapter focuses primarily on setting database options when preparing your application for distribution.

You need to be concerned with many issues when preparing an Access application for distribution. Distributing your application properly not only makes installing and using the application easier for the end user, but also makes updating and maintaining the application easier for you, the application's developer. In addition, the support required for an application is greatly decreased by properly preparing and packaging the database and associated ...