Note: Some of our software now has the ability to use Access files without the Access Database Engine. See the installation instructions under the particular product you are working with.
Access Database Driver with Office 365 Desktop
Office 365 Desktop subscription products are installed with the Click-to-Run (C2R) technology that runs the product in a self-contained virtual environment on the local computer.
Office 365 does not install the “Microsoft Office XX.X Access Database Engine OLE DB provider”, where XX.X stands for version (12.0, 15.0 or 16.0).
Without this provider, our software is not able to access new-generation Office data files (XLSX for Excel and ACCDB for Access).
With this configuration, our software can only use data from legacy files, such as .CSV, .XLS and .MDB. This is because the provider needed to access these data sources is part of the standard Windows distribution. (Usually the “Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB Provider”.)
Office 365 Desktop installations are different from regular distributions of Microsoft Office, which rely on Windows Installer (MSI package) to install and update the software. In the case of an MSI installation, the database provider is installed on your computer together with the Office applications and so everything works fine (unless you’ve installed 64bit Office, which is a separate problem).
Solution
To use new-generation Office data files (.XLSX and .ACCDB) with our software, you need to make sure that a “Microsoft Office XX.X Access Database Engine OLE DB provider” is available on your system. If not installed with Office (as is the case with Office 365), you must install the provider yourself.
There is, however, one caveat. You cannot install Office C2R and a stand-alone provider of the same major version side by side (source from office.com). You need to install the provider of a lower version than your current Office 365 version. For example, if you have Office 365 in version 2016, you should install the “Microsoft Access 2013 Runtime” or “Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable”; and not “Microsoft Access 2016 Runtime”.
(Attribution: NiceLabel KB)