Having troubles connecting MS Access 2003 into SQL Server 2012 back-end. Working with another team to figure out the issues. I am wondering if there is a limit as to how far forward Ms Access 2003 can go?
To my knowledge there is no version-specific limit; it really depends on what specifically you are trying to do. For example, I just successfully connected to SQL Server 2014 Express (running on Windows 7) from Access 2003 (running on Windows Server 2003) using the old "SQL Server" ODBC driver. I currently don't have ready access to a SQL Server 2016 instance, but I would expect that simply establishing such a connection would be technically possible as well.
No doubt such a connection will be unable to take advantage of some newer SQL Server features, e.g., those supported by newer ODBC drivers like "SQL Server Native Client" and its successors. However, many of those features are largely irrelevant to an Access/SQL_Server setup anyway (with the possible exception of datetime2 column support). The key point is that there is no hard limit that "Access 2003 is simply unable to connect to SQL Server version 'x' or newer.".