Access Cookbook

Find out What Language Version of Access Is Installed

Problem

You distribute your applications in several countries, and your users have different internationalized versions of Access 2002 installed. You’d like your applications to be able to make decisions based on the installed version of Access. How can you find out which language version of Access is currently running?

Solution

In older versions of Access, you had to use an API call to get this information. However, starting with Access 2000, it is possible to retrieve language information using the Microsoft Office Object Library. This solution demonstrates how you can gather the language information you need.

Load and run the form frmLanguage in 04-05.MDB. As it loads, it calls the necessary functions to determine the currently running language version of Access. Figure 4-10 shows the form after it’s been loaded into a retail U.S. English version of Access.

Figure 4-10. frmLanguage indicates the language version of Access that’s running

To include this functionality in your own applications, follow these steps:

1. Import the module basFileLanguage from 04-05.MDB into your own application. This module includes constants representing the seven most commonly used languages and their related intrinsic constants and values.

2. Declare a long integer variable, lngLanguage. When your application starts up, make a call to acbAccessLanguage ...