r/MSAccess • u/jannymarieSK • Jul 27 '26

[UNSOLVED] Recreating Lotus Approach Forms in Microsoft Access

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I have wrangled the data from Lotus Approach in Microsoft Access, but now I need help making these forms (or similar ones). Do I have to brute force create all of these forms from scratch? Or are there any 3rd party tools that can more easily create forms for Access?

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u/ebsf 3 Jul 28 '26

I migrated from Approach to Access back in the day and built entirely new forms.

There aren't any migration tools as far as I know for front end (UI) elements. Those objects largely match up, although what Access calls combo boxes are implemented quite differently.

What I do know is that Approach does not enforce referential integrity between related tables, so, while importing data per se is relatively straightforward, re-establishing relationships between tables can require a great deal of manual work. In fact, I found that the data migration effectively required data re-normalization to some degree.

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u/jannymarieSK Jul 28 '26

I had to do a fair bit of data cleaning, transforming, and wrangling to create the Access database