Final Lineup Announced for Access DevCon Vienna 2024

The agenda has been released for the upcoming Access DevCon Vienna 2024 online conference happening April 18 and 19.

As always, this year's lineup features an exciting mix of Access experts from Microsoft and the global developer community covering a wide range of topics. Here are the highlights:

News from the Access Team

The Microsoft Access team will kick things off with the latest updates and a look ahead at the future of Access. Expect demos of new charting enhancements, the revamped SQL query editor, and other innovations in the pipeline. The team will also field questions from the audience.

Access Community Update

Access MVP Karl Donaubauer presents a "State of the Union" style update on everything that's happened in the Microsoft Access world since the 2023 DevCon, including new features, bug fixes, usage trends, and notable community developments. His expert developer-focused commentary provides unique insights to help attendees stay current on all things Access.

UI Ergonomics and Design

Karl will also dive into the principles of ergonomic and user-centered UI design for Access databases. Referencing his presentations and consulting from the past 20 years, he'll examine what has and hasn't changed, discuss challenges specific to Access, and provide practical tips any developer can implement.

Navigating the AI Skies: Unleashing Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI

Martina Grom, Microsoft Regional Director and CEO of atwork, will demonstrate leveraging Copilot and Azure AI to integrate data and optimize business outcomes using familiar Microsoft 365 tools. She'll show how to build your own Copilot solutions to boost productivity.

SD OpenAI Add-In for Access + AI Tools

Alexander Denz of SDWin will give an overview of his SDOpenAI add-ins that bring AI capabilities into Access, Excel, Word and Outlook. Supporting multiple languages, the behavior can be fully customized via the underlying prompts. He'll also highlight the VBA editor AI extensions.

You can REALLY do all that with Forms?

Access MVP Colin Riddington (aka, IslaDogs) will share a smorgasbord of advanced tips and tricks to supercharge your Access forms. Techniques covered include highlighting, continuous forms enhancements, datasheet forms with buttons, animation effects, and much more.

Microsoft Fabric

Ynte Jan Kuindersma will introduce Microsoft's next-gen Fabric toolset for data management and analysis. He'll explain the key concepts of the Lakehouse for data science and the Data Warehouse for BI, both of which feature SQL endpoints to enable Access integration.

Custom VBIDE Add-Ins with twinBASIC

I will be presenting a step-by-step guide on how to use your existing VBA skills to build custom add-ins for the VBA IDE using twinBASIC. We'll cover the latest twinBASIC features, walk through creating an MZ-Tools style add-in from scratch, and how to deploy it.

Effective Client Communication Strategies

Armen Stein shares the proven communication techniques his firm J Street Technology uses to ensure the success of every project. Topics include getting the most out of initial conversations, creating clear project plans, managing scope changes, and providing great ongoing support.

Consolidating Scattered Notes and Data

Many Access databases end up with important unstructured data like notes and to-dos scattered across multiple tables. Crystal Long demonstrates techniques to centralize this information to unlock new insights and capabilities. She'll even be sharing a free tool to help with the process.

Bonus: Free Access Developer Tools

The session will wrap up with quick demos of a couple useful free tools:

• Peter Cole's update to the AccessAPIScanner for working with 64-bit Access
• An introduction to the MSAccess-VCS-AddIn for version controlling your Access projects

Registering for Access DevCon Vienna

The cost of the conference is 108 Euros (about $118 USD based on the conversion rate as of writing).

To join me and the other speakers for the world's premier Microsoft Access conference, you can register here: DevCon Vienna 2024 Registration.

Acknowledgements

• Presentation topic summaries generated with the help of Claude-3-Opus
• Cover image created with Microsoft Designer