Week in Review: February 17, 2024

Highlights include generating hashes with the Windows API, designing datasheets in VBA, creating custom checkboxes, and hiding subforms until the parent has data.

Week in Review: February 17, 2024

Just Published

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

Articles

Videos‌


New to Me

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

Nothing new this week.


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.

  • March 6, 2024: Thomas Möller - Better Access Charts in the new Edge Browser Control
  • March 7, 2024: Linda Ewen - Sharing Data with Users Outside Your Local Network
  • March 15, 2024: Access Day - in-person Access conference in Seattle, WA area
  • March 26, 2024: Steve Schapel - Unraveling Constraints – A Case Study
  • April 3, 2024: Dale Fye - Working with Command Bars and the Access Shortcut Tool
  • April 9, 2024: UK Access User Group - April 2024 Conference - in-person Access conference at Imperial College, London (JUST ADDED)
  • April 18-19, 2024: Access DevCon Vienna - (Online in Microsoft Teams) Agenda to be announced
  • May 1, 2024: Colin Riddington - View & Edit Import/Export (IMEX) Data Task Specifications


Access Roadmap

There were NO CHANGES to the roadmap between the last Week in Review (2024-02-10) and this one (2024-02-17).

The development priorities were last updated at the German-language AEK conference on October 14, 2023.


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 or Access engineering team presentations.  I'll include a link to the source of 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, Microsoft's Plans for Access in the Next 6 Months.

The items are listed in priority order according to Principal Engineering Manager Dale Rector.  The "Expected Benefit" of each feature is shown in italics after the description of the feature itself.

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) Improved product quality and reliability
  2. Access becomes Large Address Aware: Removal of key customer error issue
  3. Dataverse export improvements: Make it easier and faster for admins to migrate their data to Dataverse
  4. Large monitor support for forms: Improved support of Access on the latest hardware
  5. Modern Chart Improvements: Expanded support for the most popular chart types and options
  6. SQL Editor Improvements: Significantly improved SQL query editing experience
  7. Inconsistent Database Error Fix

Special thanks to Karl Donaubauer for posting the updated priorities at AccessForever.org.

In Development

Rolling Out

None.

Launched

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

All original code samples by Mike Wolfe are licensed under CC BY 4.0