So What’s Your Access Version And Build No?

Since Click-to-run (CTR or C2R) came out, one of the fundamental questions anyone trying to help out other users with their problems asks is:

What Version and Build are you running?

The problem is this question seems so mundane, yet it can be very confusing!

I’ve previously covered the subject

MS Access - Determine Build Number

With the never ending updates for Office 365/2016 it has become necessary to be able to determine what build number you, your users, are running to be able to determine if you have all the latest updates installed, and/or determine if you have a known bugged update installed… so you can determine if you need to update/revert your installation. As per most things, it isn’t really hard to locate this information once you’ve done so once.

That said, I never covered the issue of 2 distinct values appearing at time and thought it important to clarify the difference and which is the correct one to refer to.

Why Are The Version And Build So Important?

It helps us determine if there are known bugs with that specific release. Each update, so each build, bring along new bugs and by telling us the Version and Build we can check known issues to either determine, or eliminate the potential of a bug causing the issue.

It also helps us try and reproduce such bugs and report them to Microsoft (it’s typically one of the first questions they ask of us! 🙂 ).

It’s similar to say buying tires, you have to tell the shop what make/model of car you have to purchase the right ones. Same for Office/Access, the make and model equate to the Version and Build and this tell us what flavor of Access you are driving! This way we can better gear our help towards the specifics of your make/model.

Which Version and Build Is The Correct One?!

Oh yes, you read that question properly!

Microsoft could not help themselves to add more confusion to the entire situation and had to add 2 places where you can locate the Version and Build. Better yet, the values may vary from one another. So which one is the correct one to supply back to anyone asking?

Note, they will not always vary, only in some cases, but you should understand the difference and know which is the correct one to use. Hence this article!

File -> Account

We can find the first set of values by going:

File -> Account

and there, under the heading About Access you will find something like:

where it reports (in this example):

Version 2307 (Build 16626.20134 Click-to-Run)

File -> Account -> About Access

We can find the second set of values by going:

File -> Account -> About Access (button)

and there, you will find something like:

where it reports (in this example):

Version 2307 (Build 16626.20110 Click-to-Run) 32-bit

Side note, this dialog also provides the Office/Access installation Bitness (32 or 64-bit), which is always a great idea to provide when asking question in forums!

The Distinction

As you can see for yourself, their is a difference in reporting of the Build No. So which is the correct one to provide when asked the question?

The build number you see on the Account page is the ‘version’ of the application file (msaccess.exe), and is the version you always want to report. The version on the About Access popup is the version on a shared component (one of the mso* dlls), and is not particularly useful, because it is not updated when there is a new release unless that particular component was updated (while the .exe build number is updated with any new release of Office regardless of what changed).Shane Groff (Microsoft Access Dev Team)

So when asked what build you are running, you want to report the former:

Version 2307 (Build 16626.20134 Click-to-Run)

from File -> Account (under the About Access heading – not the one from the pop-up dialog). However, the bitness provided by the 2nd dialog is also very useful.

Also, even though I am using Access as an example in this article, the same is true of any other Office application (Excel, Outlook, Word, …).