As reported in forum posts, comments here and my own testing, it appears that the new Northwind 2.0 template is not available to any non-English installations.
Now I have a couple questions out on the subject to the powers that be and Microsoft and will report back once I have valid information on the subject, but for those of you still wanting to look over the English version and cannot access the files, below are 2 direct downloads:
Northwind starter edition
https://binaries.templates.cdn.office.net/support/templates/en-us/tf11138777_win32.accdt
Northwind dev edition
https://binaries.templates.cdn.office.net/support/templates/en-us/tf22238896_win32.accdt
How Did I Figure This Out?!
For anyone trying to understand how I managed to get these links, it wasn’t hard as it is all stored in the registry. So, on my 32-bit installation, I simply read the entries for the following registry:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Access\Internet\Recent Templates
This doesn’t work on 64-bit installations as the URL are stored differently and don’t work as is.
Download From Microsoft Template Page
Updated: 2023-04-28
Note that you can now download the templates directly from Microsoft’s official Featured Access templates page:
as the 2 templates were recently added as neither were there yesterday morning when this article was originally posted.
IMPORTANT: The Northwind 2.0 templates only are available for en-us localization. So if you navigate to the site on your own, use a bookmark, and you are set in another locale the templates will not appear for you. So use the link provided above to avoid any issues or be sure to switch over to the en-us which is the English (United States) option from the selection (at the bottom of the page). I’ve been informed by Microsoft that it is just a question of it propagating through their site, so it should become available to all locales in the coming days.
I’d like to extend a special thank you to Karl Donaubauer for a recent e-mail that made me look at the site again and see the templates had finally been added and thus this new section to this article.
Workaround – Windows Regional Settings
It has been reported that if you switch your Access language to English and also change your Regional Setting to “English (US)” the templates will become accessible.
Just changing the Regional Setting as original advised will not work in all cases. For what it is worth, I did try this, but it did not make any difference for my installation of Access in French and the Template files never were available to me. It was only when I switched everything to English that they appeared.
That’s All She Wrote Folks
I’m stopping here, as once again I am being pulled in to deal with another Microsoft bug (and I said I wasn’t doing that anymore!) and 4 hours of my time is already gone.
As I already stated in a comment on this subject, I’d highly urge anyone experiencing such issues because there setup in non-English to post on the official blog about the issue:
As well as via the Feedback Portal:
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/818e3b49-e61b-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472
I’d also say you should post on the projects website, but I haven’t been able to find any GitHub repo or other site. If you know of one, please drop me a comment below so it can be made available to everyone.
You can always post elsewhere, in forums for instance, but the 2 above are at least directly visible to Microsoft, for what it’s worth.
Hi. I had the same issue as you, using French ms Access (long live Québec!). Turns out I switch my office to us English ui And my windows country to US and the new northwind templates were then available. In case you need the info for some of your customers…
Ben Dubuc
This isn’t a Quebec issue. This is just one more Microsoft screw up! Just one of many, many, many, ….
Dear Daniel,
Is that any possible way to convert hem to 64 bit
The 32-bit template is in fact universal. So the templates works in both bitnesses. So feel free to download them and they should work.
i have Office 2010 64bit ! it don’t work for me! any help
You’d have to contact one of the developers:
– Tom van Stiphout
– George Hepworth
– Kim Young
– George Young
– Dawn Taylor
to try and get support, but Microsoft and many developers don’t support old versions so you might be out of luck.
You could also post in a forum (perhaps in the announcement post itself: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/access-blog/announcing-new-templates-for-microsoft-access-northwind-2-0-is/ba-p/3806082) to see if anyone can help, but you’ll need to provide specific information about what doesn’t work exactly.
Best of luck.