Power Accelerate

Files Everywhere, Owners Nowhere

Departmental .accdb files live on file shares, OneDrive folders and forgotten laptops. Nobody runs an inventory. Nobody knows which ones are still in use, which hold the only copy of business-critical data, and which are safe to delete. The estate grows quietly until something breaks.

Stuck in Place

Access has been the no-modern-path platform for a decade. Files sit on shares, accumulating records and VBA, with no credible migration story. Bespoke rebuilds don't scale - and until AI tooling matured, every modernization estimate came back with six-month timelines and consultancy quotes nobody wanted to sign.

VBA & Form Logic Is Where the Value Is

A typical departmental Access app has 30 tables, 80-150 saved queries, a handful of forms and reports - and a layer of VBA that does the real work: validation, approvals, batch updates, email triggers, integration calls. Lose the VBA and you've lost the application.

Access Expertise Is Disappearing

VBA developers are retiring. New hires don't learn Access. Each year of delay means more institutional knowledge lost, more apps that only one person can support, and more risk concentrated in a tool Microsoft hasn't invested in for a decade.

Archive

For .accdb files whose records are no longer actively updated but whose data must survive. Compliance retention, audit trail, regulator handover. Records, attachments and history are extracted to a queryable SQLite archive - no rebuild needed.

Typical signals: no record changes in the last 12 months, no VBA activity, single-table or trivial structure, file untouched on the share.

Lift

For files with simple structure but ongoing use. Flat schema, a few forms, light validation, no VBA or only trivial macros. These map naturally to Dataverse tables with a Model-Driven app, or to a Canvas app on SharePoint Lists - fast, lightweight, no over-engineering.

Typical signals: small T-shirt size, fewer than ~10 tables, low VBA line count, embedded macros only, no linked tables.

Rebuild

For files with real business logic that need to keep working. VBA modules, complex forms and reports, saved queries the application relies on, linked tables to SQL Server or SharePoint, macros that drive workflow. AI rebuilds the full application on Power Platform with VBA surfaced as Dataverse plugins, approval logic as Power Automate flows, and data already migrated.

Typical signals: significant VBA LOC, dozens of forms and reports, action queries, linked tables, macro/VBA mix, departmental-critical use.

Records & Fields

Every record from every table, plus every non-action saved query materialized as a synthetic table tagged with its source SQL. Field values, lookups, multi-valued fields, computed columns - preserved with original structure intact.

Attachments & OLE Objects

Attachment columns (.accdb only) and OLE-object columns captured per record. Metadata in the SQLite archive; bytes stay in place by default - opt-in to materialize them locally as a content-addressed blob store.

Forms & Reports Source

Every form and report exported via SaveAsText into a portable source tree - control hierarchy, property values, embedded macros, event procedure stubs. Code-behind preserved inline with the host form. Source-of-truth for the AI rebuild step.

Macros & VBA

Standalone macros and embedded macros (on control events) captured as their declarative XML. VBA module source - standard, class and form/report code-behind - exported verbatim. Compiled .accde files flagged as "source stripped" with a clean fallback path.

Linked Tables & Connect Strings

The full external-dependency map - SQL Server, SharePoint, ODBC, file-share Access links - with connect strings, schema references and authentication context. Premium-connector exposure surfaced before you sign the licensing PO.

Portable Output

One SQLite database per file, one table per Access table (plus virtual tables for saved queries), one row per record. Plus a Markdown manifest documenting every column. Queryable, archive-grade, Power-Platform-ready.