Like many users, I have not yet upgraded to CR 2020. I connect to lots of legacy data using DAO connections (e.g. Raiser’s Edge export data). To do this using CR 2020 involves installing new 64-bit connectors and updating each report. I’ve written up instructions on installing the new drivers but I haven’t applied the steps here since I am still on CR 2016.

This week I heard from a user who has to read legacy MDB files from Raiser’s Edge, using CR 2020. They followed my instructions to download the new driver, but got an error message when they tried to install it. The error said:

“You cannot install the 32-bit version of Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016 because you currently have 64-bit Office products installed. If you want to install 32-bit Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016, you will first need to remove the 64-bit installation of Office products. After uninstalling the following product(s), rerun setup in order to install 32-bit version of Microsoft Access Database Engine 2016:”

The funny thing is that they also tried to install the 32-bit driver and got the opposite error. So even though I don’t have CR 2020 I downloaded the 64-bit Access driver and tried to install it. I got the same error.

After a bit of research I found a way to get the driver to install without having to uninstall anything, by running the install from the command line using the ‘quiet’ switch. Here are the steps I used:

1) Download the file to my downloads directory
2) open a command line window
3) change the directory in the command line window to \downloads
4) Run the command with the “quiet” switch. It will look something like this:

C:\Users\ken\Downloads>AccessDatabaseEngine_X64.exe /quiet

You can also read the discussion where I found this method here:

https://superuser.com/questions/1557350/

After testing it here I did the same thing for Raiser’s Edge user and got them working as well.