Week in Review: July 27, 2024

Mike Wolfe -

Just Published

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

Articles

Videos‌

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.

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