Access - Excel Link - unhappily resolved

[DBinPhilly]

I had posted a problem a while back about a link between MS Access and MS Excel 2003 that had been working for years and then suddenly ceased to work.

An Access query was updating an Excel spreadsheet with monthly data on a employee cost assignment system. The program was only run once a month. It was fine in September but in October it stopped working. The spreadsheet - in fact all Excel spreadsheets - were locked when linked to an MS Access database.

THE UNHAPPY ANSWER:

The error was solved when research showed that the IT department had moved users to MS Office Service Pack 3 sometime in October. When we took the user back to Service Pack 2 the program worked again.

Obviously this isn't a great solution to the problem IF anyone sees where we went wrong, I would be glad to hear it.

[Oorang]

Hi Phil,
It might not be SP3 that caused your problem. Could you be more specific when you say "Link"?

[DBinPhilly]

I used:
File --->
Get External Data --->
Link Tables--->

I chose to open an Excel spreadsheet, went to a pre-formatted spreadsheet that had one worksheet set aside for MS Access - MS Excel interaction, and used that worksheet as a table. I used to be able to write data from Access to Excel based upon a query that selected information at month end. I would put a line out for each record in the query which was formated in the identical manner as the worksheet.

Data in the written-to worksheet was then acted upon within the overall spreadsheet by standard excel references.