Migrate Microsoft Access application to... well, that is the question?

I developed a medium sized MS Access application back in 2004. Over the years it has grown old and my small bugfixes and improvements don't cut it anymore.

I always hear people yammering about how bad Access is and how it is not modern yadda,yadda. I'm quite happy with it and it does what it is supposed to do (Provide a stable frontend for a simple database).

My application uses lots of custom forms with subforms and lots of VBA code to do this and that. The most important part of the application is actually to provide the data for Word Mail Merges an开发者_StackOverflow中文版d to print badges and other material for a conference (via Access reports). And exactly this printing integration is why I can't think of any alternatives.

Any web based solution will be a hassle to create nice looking reports (or at least not with the easy of Access) - create pixel perfect layouts and mold them into PDFs, direct printing FTW. Any Windows Forms application will take long to develop and ultimately I would just be recreating functionality of MS Access (e.g. together with SSRS).

Can you think of any alternatives I have missed? I am basically just looking for ideas.

Well, if you use built in functionality in Access the best path might be to not abandon Access but rather to rebuild the application as a new Access application.

Start by breaking out parts of the application to classes to get all related code together and clean up that code.

This way you could still use the parts of access you really have use for but the code will be better.

Also take a look on a book I like, Clean Code

Here is some other talk about this book.

Refactoring code like this is also a good way to get to know all the intricate parts of it ;)

And you will not risk losing any functionality.

If you later get to build it on another platform, most of the refactoring would probably be reusable.