Cannot see .accdb as an option for data input

[Mattbeatty89]

I need to pull in some data from an Access db (.accdb) but it is not showing as an option.  Has anyone else experienced this issue and found a way to get the data in?  

I am using Alteryx Designer 10.5 x64

[patrick_digan · Accepted solution]

My first guess would be to install the Access Database Engine that this post describes. We ran into this issue when we upgrade our MS Office products. Be careful about the 32/64 option as we're running 64 bit Alteryx on a 64 bit machine but needed to install the 32 bit Access Database Engine for this to work.

Do let me know know if that doesn't fix your issue!

Patrick

[Mattbeatty89]

Thank you so much for the quick solution!  I had searched around the community some before posting and tried installing a couple suggested things from another post regarding xlsx and accdb but it either didnt work or I installed the incorrect version. 

However this worked great, thank you for the caution regarding which bit to select as well.

Have a great day!

[ColinG]

For future searchers that find this from Google, the Alteryx article is no longer accurate/dated information and the links are broken. The 2010 redistributable is no longer supported, now the correct link for the 2016 redistributable is

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54920

If you have Office 365 the 32 bit version will refuse to install, you can only install the 64 bit version. After installing and restarting, in an input tool if you select "Set up a connection", "Files", "accdb" the file picker that comes up does not show accdb files that are available in that folder.

If you try to paste the file location directly into the input tool, the list of available input types still does not include an accdb option, and the few that I tried including mdb still return an error. So this no longer works, unless there is another workaround to specifically call the accessdatabaseengine_X64.exe jet engine, through an ODBC connection or something that I haven't figured out yet.

[ColinG]

Oh gosh now I just found this post

Trying to connect to an Access Database by setting... - Alteryx Community

And it shows there is a runtime specifically for 365 here which maybe this would work where the 2016 didn't

Download and install Microsoft 365 Access Runtime - Microsoft Support

I wish Microsoft website would do a better job chaining the same tools together to where you can easily find the most current version for your install. There are so many cases where they don't and you can't tell if it's ok to use an older version, or there is a newer version hidden somewhere else on their website.