I've been handed a rather large, old, and crusty Access 2000/2003 database to clean up. I'll need to rename a number of tables and fields, but need to do so in a way that doesn't break existing queries. (Fortunately, there are no macros, forms, or reports to worry about.)
I've heard there are some commercial tools to make this job easier, but only found one (http://www.rickworld.com/products.html).
Can anyone recommend this software, or any alternatives?
This may be a case for Name Autocorrect: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA010345661033.aspx
See if the code in this answer will do what you want: Programatically rename tables in Access queries. It should work for field names as well as table names.
Name AutoCorrect is something I use only when I'm consciously renaming tables/fields/Access objects. When I'm done with the "great renaming" I turn it off.
For a recent project, I did that but also knocked together a little utility so I could transfer my renaming from my working database to the production database. The utility does some other things as well (such as copying relationships and deleting lookup fields). You can download it from my website's Access downloads page. It's very rough and with very little error trapping, so use at your own risk.
For the most recent project, I used Name AutoCorrect, the database above, and then Rick Fisher's Find & Replace and a very useful but no longer available Find/Replace utility called MDBSearch, credited to "Ucora and Jamie Hornstein." I don't even know where I got it, and can no longer locate it on the web. It may be available somewhere I didn't look.
I've used Black Moshannon's SpeedFerret in the past, and it's a superb product (the slickest and fullest-featured of any Access Find/Replace utility I've seen) but they've not kept up with newer versions of Access, and I see no evidence that a new version is coming out. Too bad, because at $99, it more than paid for itself within the first couple of hours of paid work.