I’ve been curiously following the development and hopeful for the release of the Northwind 2.0 project for quite some time now and was happy to see George’s post
Sadly, a month later still nothing! Not sure why such a premature announcement was made. (keep reading, there’s actually good news)
Or Is There Nothing!
Nous n’avons pas tourvé les modèles Access correspondant à ce que vous recherchez.
So it seems that Northwind 2.0 is only be available to English installations.
Talk about an oversight! Let’s hope things are in the works behind the scenes to make it available to other installation locales.
Update: For anyone using a non-English installation, refer to: https://www.devhut.net/access-northwind-2-0-direct-downloads/ for a workaround.
The reality is that they have to jump through all sorts of red tape to get the template approved… and make things official (I suppose) but today, on my Access 2019 installation look what showed up in the search when I went looking.
So even if not officially announced, it does appear to be available! (Shhh, it’s a secret though.)
Yep, my suspicions were correct as George just posted:
So someone has definitely prematurely released things (to our benefit none the less), IMHO.
To take it for a test ride, simply:
- open Access
- select New (on the left-hand side bar)
- in the ‘search for online templates’ textbox enter the term Northwind
- press the little magnifying glass to activate the search and the templates will appear
Have fun exploring!
Side note: the Developer edition crashed the 1st time it installed and ran, but after a subsequent launch it loaded properly. I’ve also managed to generate several errors when testing it as well as being able to bypass the login form to still access the rest of the database.
I’m also very surprised that there is only an English version available, no localization for the content/captions… (Heck this could have been automated quite easily!) I’m actually surprised Microsoft would do/allow that to be release like that. That quite a slap in the face to the global community IMHO. Then again, what do I know!
Supported Versions
I can confirm that Northwind 2.0 is available for:
- Access 2016
- Access 2019
- Access 2021+
- Access MS365
Sadly, it is NOT available in Access 2013 (VERY disappointing!), or versions prior to that (2010, 2007, …) either.
Support Documentation
If you try the templates out you will be able to then find official support pages:
Finally, an Official Announcement!
As of this afternoon, Microsoft finally made an official announcement on the subject:
I just wanted to thank you for this post. I had read about Northwind 2 a while back in a forum and was surprised at how long things took and never found any links to see progress, or any information about the project.
Thank you for the links and explanation on how to obtain a copy.
Why the Microsoft Access Team isn’t shouting this at the top of the their lungs, their blogs and other online networking tools is simply depressing to me.
All that to say thank you for always providing this type of information to the rest of us. I really wish you’d start posting about bugs again, your site was the best source of information on the subject, far better than anything Microsoft put out there!
Thanks
Nice to see a comment popup while I’m in the process of actually editing the post.
It’s always nice to read that others appreciate my contributions. So thank you for leaving the comment, it really does mean a lot to me!
I don’t know why the templates are available even though no official announcement has been made anywhere?! I think someone has release them early, would be my guess. Then again, at least they are finally here for people to explore and hopefully learn from.
Sadly, no, I will not be starting back up with bug tracking. There are too many to keep up with, even Karl’s new website on the subject isn’t keeping up with them all and they’re 5 people working at it. There’s only 1 of me and Access is no longer my primary subject matter anymore, or at all in reality. That ship has sailed. While Microsoft sat idly by for 10+ years doing little to truly update and modernize their product, forget about listening to all the internal and external suggestions!, the rest of the world moved forward and there are some truly nice alternatives and that is where I concentrated my energies for the past couple of years and now have started to carve out a niche market bringing data to the web by building proper web applications that run on any device (desktop, laptop, mobile, tablet, MAC, PC, LINUX, Android, iOS, …).
One of my biggest Access clients was the reason for this leap. After one of many flawed updates that crippled their entire operation and they lost thousands of $$$ in downtime they asked me to find a solution. So I set out and converted the entire thing over to a 100% web based solution which they have been running for 3-4 years now. Once you make the leap forward, you will never look back at Access the same way!
Hi Daniel. Been doing some reading up on Northwind 2, preparing a video on the subject, and I came across your comments. I’m curious… what tools did you switch to for building online databases?
Hi Richard.
I went the route of learning PHP and everything that goes with that (Javascript, JQuery, HTML, CSS, …). The reason being I didn’t want to ever be tied down by a third party like has been the case of Access where I’m at the mercy of MS and their blundered update history. I looked for an open source, free, well established and supports tool and ended up going with PHP and then I use a framework to drastically accelerate development (instead of trying to reinvent the wheel!).
I won’t lie, it wasn’t an easy transition and took a lot of work to get to where I am now, but the end results speak for themselves! There’s simply no comparison at the end of the day and it is accessible on any device with access to the internet.
Another big improvement for which I’ve received numerous positive comments from clients is regarding the look. Access still feels like a 80’s tool, but when you do web development the world is your oyster and you can implement whatever you want, modern icons, colors, …
Also, people talk about Access’ ease at consuming different data sources. I just recently had to switch a client from using MySQL to Azure Database and all it required for my web app was a change to a single line of code. So if you set yourself up properly with such technologies, they too, are extremely flexible.
I’ll stop there for now, but PHP is where I landed to never be at the mercy of Microsoft, or any other 3rd party, ever again.
Hello Daniel.
Do you know how to get the new templates from a Franch Canadian Office installation? I know the templates are in English, and I’m totally fine wiht that, but I can’t get to them while doing a search in the “New” page in MS Access 365.
Thanks,
Benoit
Sadly, it appears to only be available in English locales. Simply ridiculous! Talk about an oversight.
This would have been the ideal opportunity to demonstrate how to handle creating a multilingual database to users!
One more thing, for anyone having this issue, I’d highly urge you to post on the official blog about the issue:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/access-blog/announcing-new-templates-for-microsoft-access-northwind-2-0-is/ba-p/3806082
As well as via the Feedback Portal:
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/818e3b49-e61b-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472
You can always post elsewhere, forums for instance) but the 2 above are at least directly visible to Microsoft, for what it’s worth.
Please review: https://www.devhut.net/access-northwind-2-0-direct-downloads/ which offers a workaround for the time being.
What a disaster the release has been not being able to get a copy until you provided a direct link. Even then, the content is solely English. It’s nice to know Microsoft doesn’t care about anyone, but their US users.
After taking them for a test drive there is some nice content, but I have also experience numerous issues and errors while using the databases. I’m a little surprised at the quality of the release.
I don’t quite understand why it took so long for the templates to appear in other locales. Even today, I still saw reports that it still wasn’t available to some users?!
Yes, I too, experienced some issues. I don’t quite know what to make of it all. I don’t know the testing that was done and at the end of the day, I can pretty much break any tool, so does it make this one bad… Then again, I had it crash immediately upon extraction, hmmmmm… BUT these are supposed to be learning tools, teach some good techniques, code, naming, … and for that I think it does a much better job than the previous version ever did. 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. So I’m a little torn as to my overall impression as it were.