Well the ambiguous error reporting from Access hit me again! It really makes one wonder who at MS comes up with which error to throw when problems occur and how they retain their job.

I have been recently trying to address a corrupted databases and finally decided that using the undocumented SaveAsText and LoadFromText functions was my last hope before having to start the database over again. So I went ahead a punched in my command:

Application.SaveAsText acForm, "MyFormName", "C:\...\MyFormName.txt"

Upon executing the command I received the following:

Run-time error ‘3709’:
The search key was not found in any record.

What the?! Can’t find what search key in what record? Is this the underlying issues with the form and why is has corrupted in the first place?

No. The issue has nothing to do with an index or any record. The most irrelevant error I have ever seen coming from Access (and I have seen some truly useless error messages being output by MS Access in the past). The problem after a quick test was simply due to the fact that the VBA project was protected and I had not unlocked the project with the appropriate password. So for anyone else trying to perform a SaveAsText and getting this ridiculous error message, ask yourself did you unlock the VBA project. If not, do so and try again.

Now that we solved this problem, hopefully someone at Microsoft could start providing error messages pertinent to the actual problem at hand, but I’m not holding my breath on that one!