Last updated: before December, 1998
The conversion is straight forward, however people have struck problems with stored finds. In order to work reliably, all stored finds should be recreated in Approach 96 and assigned a name. See 'Stored Finds in Approach 96/97'.
Once an .apr has been converted it can no longer be used by an older version of Approach. Therefore make sure you keep a copy of your old .apr just in case you strike problems or need the old version for some reason.
Your data remains unchanged and can still be access by any version of Approach, as well as any other database program that uses the data format (dBase IV by default) you are using. (MS-Access, Paradox, etc...)