MS Access – VBA – The Save Operation Failed

I was recently working on a database of mine which has been in production for over 4 years now and all of a sudden it started giving me the error: “The Save Operation Failed”. Nothing like a nice obscure error message from the VBA/VBE!!!

I tried the normal approaches: Compact and repair, Decompile/Recompile, … None worked for me.

I took a look at Microsoft’s Knowledge Base and found an article, ACC97: Error “The Save operation failed” When Saving a Module, for Access 97 (as a lot of the information can be used in future version, I read it over). Sadly, the article is pretty much useless.

In the end, the solution, for me, was to start a new database and import all of the database objects (File -> Get External Data -> Import) from the database giving me the error message. Setup the startup properties… and everything was in working order again!

I hope this helps someone else in the same predicament!

2 responses on “MS Access – VBA – The Save Operation Failed”

  1. Wykon

    Thanks, it realy helps me.

    I found also the article and it was useless because my module names were fine and i had saved my database hundreth times before.

    1. admin Post author

      Glad it helped.

      Some times the easiest solution to unexplained problems in Access is a simple import of everything into a new database shell. This is also a good idea after development, just before deploying the database, give it a clean, fresh start. And it is easy to do, 2-3 minutes and you’re back up and running.