Access™ 2007 Bible

Chapter 35. Distributing Access Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Defining Current Database options

• Testing the application

• Polishing the application

• Bulletproofing the application

• Separating tables from the application

• Documenting the 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 worry about application distribution sooner or later. You don't even have to develop commercial software to be concerned with distribution; for example, 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 all the preceding points to some degree. However, because some of the listed items, such as error handling and splitting tables, are covered in detail in other chapters, 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 it also makes updating and maintaining the application easier for you. In addition, the support required for an application is greatly decreased by properly preparing and packaging the database and associated files for distribution.