How do you use version control with Access development?

Question

I\'m involved with updating an Access solution. It has a good amount of VBA, a number of queries, a small amount of tables, and a few forms for data entry & report gene

Answer 1

The compose/decompose solution posted by Oliver is great, but it has some problems:

• The files are encoded as UCS-2 (UTF-16) which can cause version control systems/tools to consider the files to be binary.
• The files contain a lot of cruft that changes often - checksums, printer information and more. This is a serious problem if you want clean diffs or need to cooperate on the project.

I was planning to fix this myself, but discovered there is already a good solution available: timabell/msaccess-vcs-integration on GitHub. I have tested msaccess-vcs-integration and it does work great.

Updated 3rd of March 2015: The project was originally maintained/owned by bkidwell on Github, but it was transferred to timabell - link above to project is updated accordingly. There are some forks from the original project by bkidwell, for example by ArminBra and by matonb, which AFAICT shouldn't be used.

The downside to using msaccess-vcs-integration compared to Olivers's decompose solution:

• It's significantly slower. I'm sure that the speed issue can be fixed, but I don't need to export my project to text that often ...
• It doesn't create a stub Access project with the exported stuff removed. This can also be fixed (by adopting code from the decompose script), but again - not that important.

Anyway, my clear recommendation is msaccess-vcs-integration. It solved all the problems I had with using Git on the exported files.