Access apparently can’t create a linked table via OLE DB.Īs I mentioned above, if you’re on Windows 10 and Microsoft Access 2016, chances are good that your machine doesn’t have an ODBC driver for Visual FoxPro installed like earlier versions. I could use an OLE DB provider to get to tables with memo fields, but only via Excel or programmatically. Once I found one, I could easily link to all of the tables-except for the ones that included variable-width memo fields.
This was harder than I expected because Windows 10 and Access 2016 no longer ship with a Visual FoxPro ODBC driver. TL DR: I fired up Microsoft Access to see if I could link to the external data. I looked under the hood and figured out that this thing uses a FoxPro database! Microsoft discontinued development of Visual FoxPro way back in 2007, and I hadn’t seen a working FoxPro database since the late 1990s…so I knew it might be tricky to get the data out. A while back, someone handed over some scheduling data in a somewhat clunky old application in desperate need of modernization.
