AccPac/Sage300 have long been able to import/export using Office file formats. However, despite Office being installed on the same computer as Sage300, Sage300 (nor any other apps) could take advantage of the Access Database Engine (ACE) to support those import/exports. This was because Microsoft wouldn't allow use of ACE outside of Office. So everyone had to install the Access Database Engine redistributable to allow Sage 300 and other apps access to the ACE OLEDB provider. I never understood why Microsoft would make me install a redistributable for a product I already had a fully licensed version of installed. I dont need a separate ACE redist when I have the full Office suite (including ACE) already installed. But that's how it was.
Recently, i noticed Microsoft stopped creating new versions of the ACE redist. I wondered why and if we were going to have to use old versions of ACE but it appears they stopped making new ACE redis versions because they are now allowing custom applications to connect to Office data without the redist.
So now I am curious an plan to try this out by removing ACE 2016 from a Sage 300 test machine and see if I can still do all the usual imports & exports. Are there any other places where ACE is leveraged in Sage 300? Has anyone tried to make this work using an Office 365/2019/2016 install?
