User-Level Security Concepts (A Brief, Legacy Note)

Older versions of Access, using the legacy .mdb format, supported a detailed "user-level security" system, letting an administrator define individual user accounts and precisely control exactly which objects each person could view or edit. This system does not exist in the modern .accdb format, which relies instead on the simpler, whole-database password covered above, combined with basic Windows file and folder permissions to control who can even reach the file at all.

If you inherit an old .mdb database that still uses this legacy security system, its rules will generally continue to work as before, but you cannot add this kind of detailed, per-user security to a brand-new .accdb database. For genuinely fine-grained, per-user permissions today, pairing an Access front-end with a proper database server is the modern recommended approach.