Week in Review: June 17, 2023

Just Published

^{This section includes videos, articles, and interesting discussions from the past 7 days.}

Articles

• Access Forever

  • Word Mail Merge from Access Disabled/Broken in Version 2305, by George Hepworth

• Maria Barnes (Business Data Bytes Newsletter)

  • How AI can change the way we work (Highly recommended)

• Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)

  • Bye Bye VMWare, Sad To See You Go
  • PHP Connection To Azure SQL Database
  • Access – Highlight The Active Control

• Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)

  • Popup forms with breakpoints & navigation (updated)
  • AEU17: Interactive Gantt Chart Scheduler
  • AEU16: Northwind 2.0-Inventory/String Functions (updated)
  • Access User Groups: Europe (AEU) (updated)
  • Breakpoints and special keys (updated)
  • Tables Disappear In Relationships Window (updated)

• Crystal Long (Ms Access Gurus | Access Access Newsletter)

  • Updated: List Word Document Properties

• Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)

  • MergeLines(): A Handy Function for Building Address Blocks
  • Form Templates Presentation to the Denver Area Access User Group
  • When Should You Include an Autonumber Column in a Table?
  • Reducing Cognitive Load: The Benefits of Consistent UI Design
  • FirstValidPath()

Videos‌

• Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)

  • Northwind 2.0 Developer Edition: Inventory and String Functions (58:44): with Tom van Stiphout and Kim Young

• Denver Area Access Users Group (YouTube channel)

  • Form Templates in Microsoft Access (1:16:02): by Mike Wolfe

• Richard Rost (YouTube channel)

  • Select Case (18:57): How to Use a Select Case Statement as an Alternative to If Then in Microsoft Access VBA
  • Case Sensitive (12:27): Perform a Case Sensitive Comparison of Two Strings in Microsoft Access
  • Save Notes (20:56): Save Notes from the Customer Form by Archiving them in the Contact History in Microsoft Access
  • Email Report (17:55): How to Use the SendObject Command to Email an Invoice or Other Report in Microsoft Access
  • Delete Query Join (19:42): How to Create a Query to Delete Records that are Missing Related Records in Microsoft Access

• Pharos Technology [Dr. Richard Hanson] (YouTube MS Access playlist)

  • Macro Management (6:26): Mastering Macro Management in Microsoft Access
  • Column Aliases (Short): *Improve Access Query Readability with Column Aliases *
  • Advanced Form Controls (8:15): Advanced Controls for Form Setup: A Comprehensive Guide
  • Workday-Only Revenue (Short): Generating Workday-Only Revenue Reports in Access
  • Cartesian Products (6:28): How to Combine Data Sets with Cross Joins for Maximum Effectiveness

New to Me

^{This section includes content I discovered this week that has been around for awhile.}

• How to Win a Sale in Seven Seconds, by Craig Elias

I'm a big fan of metaphors and I especially liked this one from the article:

I once heard someone describe the process of piquing interest as building a bridge. The way bridges were built in the old days was by using a bow and arrow with some thread tied to the end of the arrow.

Once the arrow was shot across the valley, a person on the other side of the valley would retrieve the arrow and pull on the thread that was attached to it. At the end of the thread there was some string.

The person would then pull on the string and at the end of the string there was some rope. That rope was strong enough to move materials back and forth and you could then build a bridge, eventually meeting in the middle.

But a rope strong enough to build a bridge is too heavy to throw all the way across the valley.

The same is true with sales.

Upcoming Access User Group Events

^{NOTE: Only English-language user group meetings with scheduled guest speakers or topics are listed.  For a complete list of upcoming events, visit the Access User Group event calendar.}

• July 5, 2023: Aleksander Wojtasz - Interactive Gantt Chart Scheduler in Access
• July 6, 2023: Greg Regan - Great Interface Design
• August 2, 2023: Juanjo Luna - Blazor: making a webApp (date updated)
• August 3, 2023: Tom van Stiphout and Kim Young - Global Error Handlers
• August 17, 2023: Richard Rost - Custom Data Entry Filter Functions in Access
• August 29, 2023: Lenni Lobel - Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB
• September 6, 2023: Thomas Möller - Better Access Charts in the new Edge browser control (date and topic updated)
• September 7, 2023: John Colby - Event Driven Programming
• October 4, 2023: Juan Soto - The Future of Access
• October 19, 2023: Alessandro Grimaldi - "VBA Pills" - Access Tips and Tricks
• November 1, 2023: John Heaser - Extending Access with SQL Server – including Geography data
• December 6, 2023: Mike Wolfe - (topic to be confirmed)

‌

Access Roadmap

There were NO CHANGES to the roadmap between the last Week in Review (2023-06-10) and this one (2023-06-17).

The development priorities were last updated on October 12, 2022.

Listed below is a snapshot of the official Access Roadmap.

"In Development", "Rolling Out", and "Launched" are Microsoft terms that I pulled straight from the public roadmap.

"Development Priorities" do not appear on the Access Roadmap.  Instead, they get updated from time to time in official Access blog posts.  I'll include a link to the official Access blog post that lists the current development priorities as they get updated.

Development Priorities

The items listed below reflect Microsoft's order of priority and were published in the following article, Our Road Ahead - Microsoft Access Engineering Priorities Oct 2022.

New priorities added since the previous set of priorities are shown in bold below.  Dropped priorities are struck through.

1. Continued Focus on Monthly Issue Fixes (Monthly Issue Fix Blog)
2. Inconsistent Database Error Fix
3. New Macro Signing Support
4. New (Modern) Web Browser Control (to support Chromium Edge)
5. Dataverse Connector Data Type Support for Floating Point
6. Dataverse Connector Data Type Support for Rich Text
7. Dataverse Connector support to export to a specific Dataverse solution or publisher
8. Enabling Large Address Aware (LAA) for 32-Bit Access
9. SQL Monaco Editor
10. New Microsoft Graph Data Connector

In Development

• APR 2023: Modern Web Browser Control
• MAR 2023: New Modern Web Browser Form Control

Rolling Out

None.

Launched

None.