When Microsoft released the 2013 version of their Office suite, the version of Microsoft Access that was included dropped support for a feature known as Access Data Projects.   Access Data Projects were a (in my opinion) little used feature of earlier versions of Access that allowed you to create an OLEDB connection from a users desktop copy of Microsoft Access to a back end SQL Server.

This allowed you to give end users the ability to interact with and edit data in a SQL Server database without requiring that they learn a new client UI, and also without requiring that you build a web facing CRUD interface to expose the data.

During the course of my day-to-day, I needed to work with a department that had previously relied on Access Data Project files to manipulate their SQL Server data.   Embedded below are the instructions that I created for them (with some minor redactions of information specific only to that department) that show how you can use Access 2013 to accomplish basically the same thing by coming at the problem a slightly different way.   Hopefully someone will find the information helpful.

If you’d prefer, you can download a copy of the PDF as well.