Our Altium database is about 2000 items, and growth rate of new components has tapered off to about 100/year.

We will never go into large production of boards and designs because that is not our main product. We don't have a lot of parts, and we don't have database experience. In the meantime, I will take another look at Kicad, but I have been following it and am not sure it's quite where we need it to be. If anyone has a workaround or suggestions, I would really appreciate it. No such problems from their sales and marketing, who pester us endlessly. Apparently this makes us a bottom tier customer based on customer service for this and other requests for help. Anyone dealt with this or have a workaround? We have a total of 6 Altium seats, a mix of fixed and floating, and have stayed current on our subscriptions the last several years. Unfortunately this affects a fair number of people, and is not a viable solution right now. Altium's suggestion is that we no longer use the macros and install 64-bit office, end of story. It turns out that if you had followed Altium's instructions before the last 365 (Version 14), they did work, but at some point Office has broken these instructions (Version 15 or 16). They have instructions to install the 64-bit MS Access component, but some members of our team have recently had new computers, and these instructions no longer work.

Apparently, Altium uses a database component from MS Office, 365 or whatever they call it, and the 32-bit version is not compatible. Furthermore, 64-bit Office/365/whatever breaks macros. The problem is this: Our company uses 32 bit MS 365 based on MS recommendations. We have done a lot of work cleaning up the libraries, and have chosen to start with an Excel database rather than MS Access to allow our assembly house to update the database (which will be checked and is under version control). Our designs are generally low-volume (100s to 1000s) of demo and development boards. My company been trying to move to a database library for Altium, since we have increased the number and complexity of designs in the last few years, and with it an increased number of people who use Altium. Folks, Perhaps someone can lend some insight here.

No footprint altium library