Access NewsCast with Karl Donaubauer: Episode 8

Karl and his precocious sidekick, Viktoria, are back for another edition of Access News:

Review of the Recent Access Engineering Priorities

Karl began with a brief review of the progress made on the recent set of Access engineering priorities as announced at the recent AEK conference:

Recent Bugs and Bug Fixes

Karl discussed new bugs that have appeared in Access, specifically relating to linked SQL Server tables.

He said there were serious update bugs and issues with this particular back-end, which Microsoft touts as secure and stable. Microsoft was able to quickly flip switches to fix some variants of bugs. In total over the past few months, 32 separate bug fixes have been published on the Access blog.

Karl also referenced AccessForever.org, where he and a group of other current and former Access MVPs maintain a long list of current bugs and bug fixes.

Changes Coming to Outlook and Publisher

Karl mentioned the Outlook team is working on a new version of Outlook that does not use COM, meaning it can no longer be programmed or automated via VBA and the object model. The Access team acknowledged this as an issue and is looking at potential replacement methods for Outlook automation, but there has been no visible response from Outlook developers. Additionally, Publisher will only be supported until October 2026, leaving Access as the sole neglected Microsoft Office app.

Recent and Upcoming Access Events

• In-Person Access Day in Redmond, WA
• On-line DevCon from Vienna, Austria
• In-Person Spanish Access Event in Valencia, Spain
• In-Person UK Conference at Imperial College, London
• In-Person German AEK Conference in Nuremberg, Germany

Interview with Juanjo Luna

Karl spoke with Access MVP and Spanish User Group chairman, Juanjo Luna, about his upcoming in-person Access event in Valencia.  

The three-day event–traditionally held in Madrid–takes place in the beach town of Valencia, helping to reduce costs for the event and encouraging attendees to bring families along to enjoy the beaches and beautiful weather.  Karl and Juanjo discussed the topics that would be covered.  Karl expressed frustration with Microsoft's apparent lack of interest in providing global support for the Access community, especially outside the English-speaking world.

Preview of DevCon Vienna and Power Apps/BI Workshops

Karl provided details on the upcoming virtual Access DevCon event in April.

He stated there are already over 100 registrations, so it will likely be the largest Access event of the year. Presentations span AI, Power Platform, UI design, the Microsoft Access team's plans, and more. The Microsoft team will present their roadmap.

Access DevCon Vienna

Speakers from all over the world, advanced Microsoft Access topics

Access DevCon Vienna

Interview with Alessandro Grimaldi

Next, Karl interviewed Alessandro Grimaldi, co-chair of the Europe Access User Group and author of the recent Access book, Access on Steroids.

Alessandro provides a brief overview and preview of his book which covers several very advanced user interface techniques using Microsoft Access.  Of all the Access techniques I've come across in my time as an Access developer and running this blog, I would rank Alessandro's UI techniques among the top 3 most technically impressive.  

Here's my top three, shown in order from most technically impressive:

1. vbWatchdog: Wayne Phillips
2. Advanced UI Techniques: Alessandro Grimaldi
3. Low-level Windows API Integrations: Stephen Lebans

That's some rarified air.

Acknowledgements

• Portions of this article's body generated with the help of Claude-2-100k