I second this viewpoint, with an additional comment.

It may be just as cost effective to upgrade Access instead. Once you have
purchased the initial license, Microsoft doesn't charge nearly as much to
upgrade. The newer versions should read the older database just fine. Buying
a new program includes not only the cost of the software but also the cost
of migrating the existing records, staff training, and future upgrades &
migrations. And if it is a computer question, buying the new CPU with a
newer version of Access bundled can also cheaper be than the out-right
purchase of the Office package after buying a new machine.

That said, we use Raizer's Edge by Blackbaud which has a lot of fields or
tabs for collecting
information.  You should be able to transfer existing Access records to
another program if your fields match and they are both SQL based. At least,
that's my experience. If the fields don't match, most times you can do the
transfer through a text document edited in Word. (I haven't done it between
PP or RE and Access, just various cataloging programs. It took me at least a
full 40 hours to clean the data in Word and do the transfer; there was
additional cleanup time after the transfer, perhaps 20 hours. It's worth
counting that as a cost, because it is.)

Kirsten Hammerstrom
Rhode Island Historical Society



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