My header pretty much says it all. Is there a Snapshot viewer that will allow me to view Microsoft Access Snapshot that will wotk in Ubuntu Edgy? I recently loaded Edgy and really like it. I have also loaded crossover but it doesn't seem to allow me to use MSV. Any ideas?

Would you be opposed to outputting your reports from Access in PDF format instead? I've got a good (free) solution that I use for that.

Unfortunetly I'm not generating the reports. They come from several different sources throughout the company. I pull these up at home to see daily performance of different facilities. It's no big deal, I can always boot up XP.

I just did a google linux search for "microsoft access snapshot viewer" and it found several Wine links, plus this thing: CDBF for Linux 2.99.02.

There may be others.

Mmmm... OpenOffice.org also seems to have some support for MDB format files from MS Access. That would be much better than the dodgy crap I linked to above..

Mmm.. there's also the mdbtools, which can query/export from MS Access databases.

Just fire up synaptic on Ubuntu/Debian, and search for MDB in name/description. Lots of links turn up.

cheers

Mark,

unfortunately, viewing snapshot files has nothing to do with the ability to view access databases. It's a proprietary format by which you can output an Access report to a portable file. Sorta like PDF but proprietary and for only one platform. It's more or less useless as you can tell. There is virtually nothing out there to convert from snapshot format to other formats. I wonder if Wine will run Microsoft's snapshot viewer?

Too true, a very strange format indeed. Access can make the snp files but can't read them. You need a viewer for that.

A guy by the name of Stephen Lebans ( http://www.lebans.com ) has written a dll (StrStorage.dll) that can decompress and convert a snp file to pdf when used in conjunction with dynapdf.dll. Perhaps these dlls can be used under Wine to do the conversion.

According to a Lebans post on a public newsgroup:

Quote:
The selected report is exported to Snapshot format.
The Snapshot file is then decompressed.
The resultant file is a standard Windows Structured Strorage object
containing Enhanced Metafiles(EMF), one for each page of the report. My code
in the StrStorage.DLL reads the Structured Storage and extracts the EMF's.
The DynaPDF library contains a function to convert EMF records to their PDF
counterparts.

That's it. Microsoft was kind enough supply me with information on the
private data structures of the Snapshot file so that I can create a PDF doc
that is identical to original Snapshot.

Ok. Just for kicks, I modified his sample application and compiled an exe with VB6. Just run snp2pdf <filename> to convert .snp to .pdf. The included dlls need to be in the same folder or the windows system folder.

grab it here: snp2pdf

Can anyone try to run this under Wine and see if it works?