Week in Review: July 27, 2024

Just Published

^{This section includes videos, articles, and (occasionally) open-source project updates from the past 7 days.}

Articles

• Jonathan Halder | Steven Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)

  • VBA conversions – implicit and explicit
  • Good candidates for Access projects
  • Hammers and nails, Access and…?
  • Use the DoEvents command wisely

• Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)

  • Localization Issues in Access

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

  • Get Unique Filename

• Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)

  • Throwback Thursday: July 25, 2024
  • Access + Outlook PDF Bug

Videos‌

• Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)

  • What is a Framework and Why Would Access Developers Use One? (01:53:38): with John Colby

• Richard Rost (YouTube channel)

  • Security Flaw, Part 1 (17:41): Identifying a Security Flaw with Linked Tables in a Microsoft Access Database (and How to Fix it)
  • Security Flaw, Part 2 (16:55): Identifying a Security Flaw with Linked Tables in a Microsoft Access Database, Part 2
  • Second Last Date (21:18): How to Determine the Date of the Second Last Order Placed by a Customer in Microsoft Access (DMax)

• Edcelle John Gulfan (YouTube channel)

  • CASCADING COMBO BOXES (09:01): in Continuous Form of Microsoft Access

New to Me

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

Best Database Design Tool as MS Access replacement

This is my favorite part of the whole exchange:

[OP]: It looks like finding a real replacement for Access is a can of worms.

[OracleGreyBeard]: Access is lowkey an amazing piece of software, and I say that as an Oracle developer 😄

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.}

• August 1, 2024: Kevin Bell - DBeaver — A better, free cross-platform database tool
• August 7, 2024: Peter Poppe - Working with Treeviews
• August 27, 2024: Maria Barnes - Working with Microsoft Graph API from VBA
• September 04, 2024: Aleksander Wojtasz - Follow-up session on Interactive Gantt charts
• October 02, 2024: Alessandro Grimaldi - Animation with Style in Access
• October 3, 2024: Ron McCarry - Using cached ODBC connection in Access with single sign-on
• November 06, 2024: Chris Arnold - Tips and Tricks for Continuous Forms
• November 26, 2024: George Young- Using Web APIs in Access
• December 04, 2024: Adrian Bell - topic to be confirmed
• January 8, 2025: Philipp Stiefel - topic to be confirmed

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the last Week in Review (2024-07-20) and this one (2024-07-27).

The roadmap was last updated the week of May 11, 2024.  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

• AUG 2024: Modern Chart Improvements
• SEP 2024: Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities

Rolling Out

None.

Launched

• NOV 2023: Making 32-bit Access Large Address Aware (LAA)