Error: “Could Not Find Installable ISAM”

Question

I've written some VBA code in an Excel workbook to retrieve data from an Access database in the same directory on a desktop. It works fine on my machine and several other machines running Windows XP, but when we tested this on a Vista machine, we encountered the following error:

Could not find installable ISAM

I've done a bunch of searching online but can't seem to find a concrete answer. The connection string seems to be fine, and, as I mentioned, it works on several machines.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? My connection string is as follows:

Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=D:\ptdb\Program Tracking Database.mdb;

Thanks

Answer 1

Use the connection string below to read from an XLSX file:

string ConnectionString = "Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=" + <> + ";Extended Properties=Excel 8.0;";

Answer 2

Try putting single quotes around the data source:

Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source='D:\ptdb\Program Tracking Database.mdb';

The problem tends to be white space which does have meaning to the parser.

If you had other attributes (e.g., Extended Properties), their values may also have to be enclosed in single quotes:

Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source='D:\ptdb\Program Tracking Database.mdb'; Extended Properties='Excel 8.0;HDR=YES;IMEX=1;';

You could equally well use double quotes; however, you'll probably have to escape them, and I find that more of a Pain In The Algorithm than using singles.

Answer 3

This problem is because the machine can't find the the correct ISAM (indexed sequential driver method) registered that Access needs.

It's probably because the machine doesn't have MSACeesss installed? I would make sure you have the latest version of Jet, and if it still doesn't work, find the file Msrd3x40.dll from one of the other machines, copy it somewhere to the Vista machine and call regsvr32 on it (in Admin mode) that should sort it out for you.