How to open a Simply 2010 DB and modify content if possible?

Question

Hello, 
 
 I was wondering about what tools are available to open and browse a Simply 2010 DB. 
 And also to modify some data. For example some transactions from 2 years ago where not allocated to Projects and there is no way to lookup this entry and adjust any longer. 
 I search teh Mysql website and saw the Workbench and other Windows Tools but they are more recent than whatever Mysql version is intalled with Simply: is it safe to install these tools without overriding the existing Simply installation? 
 Thank you! 
 
 Isabel

Richard S. Ridings · Accepted Answer

Isabel 
 
Check to see if your userid has security rights for Third-Party products set to Read-only or Read/Write. Randy was incorrect when he said that sysadmin is set automatically, it is not anymore, but I can't remember when that changed. 
 
In the ODBC driver utility in the Control Panel you can tell if the driver is installed (Administrative Tools, Data Sources). If it is not installed (which is unlikely) you can install it yourself from the original CD /bin/MySQLODBC folder from a file called 
 
mysql-connector-odbc-commercial-3.51.19-win32.msi 
 
However, if you are running a 64-bit version of Excel, it might not work at all. Simply is a 32-bit program.

RandyW · Answer

mis2000 said: I was wondering about what tools are available to open and browse a Simply 2010 DB. 
 Any reporting tool or database client that can connect to data using ODBC. SAP Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Query, Microsoft Access, LibreOffice BASE. 'sysadmin' has full "third party" ODBC rights, other user IDs can be assigned Log in as sysadmin (if no password is set, you are logging in as sysadmin) and set the appropriate read-only or read-write rights. 
 mis2000 said: And also to modify some data. For example some transactions from 2 years ago where not allocated to Projects and there is no way to lookup this entry and adjust any longer. 
 While this is possible, it's more complicated than you might expect. The Project data is stored in multiple tables for a single transaction (invoice, invoice line items, G/L detail which can be further broken down into project detail, and there are summary balances for each project, for each account - it's not as simple as adding a project number ID in one place. 
 What I did, was open datadict.pdf, save it as text, import that into Excel, and then tidy it up and made notes. Once that's all sorted out, I could autofilter the descriptions to find references to 'Project'. The table naming convention helps a bit, except there really isn't one consistent naming format - some project tables end with a P, some contain 'PRJ' in the table name, and some might be 'PJ'? or just have a 'P' in the table name, as do the accessible payroll tables. 
 mis2000 said: I search teh Mysql website and saw the Workbench and other Windows Tools but they are more recent than whatever Mysql version is intalled with Simply: is it safe to install these tools without overriding the existing Simply installation? 
 You don't need any of those tools, Simply Accounting 2010 would have used the MySQL ODBC connector (3.51?), perhaps a customized build, and some version of MySQL database. You can check the installed version in Control Panel if you're curious. Installing other versions, and especially uninstalling the required one, will likely stop Simply Accounting from working at all. Installing Workbench is not necessary if you just want to work with / on the data. 
 But I wouldn't do it at all, unless there was a huge payoff to make it worthwhile. I doubt there will ever be a commercial tool for doing this either, since direct manipulation of historical data for a good reason would require the same methods as doing it for a bad (i.e. fraudulent) one. 
 I hope that helps, please post back.

Sage 50 Canada

How to open a Simply 2010 DB and modify content if possible?

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