Week in Review: September 14, 2024

Just Published

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

Articles

• Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)

  • Finishing the Combobox Group Headers
  • The Joys of Combo Dropdown Group Headers
  • An example of using AI to write a function
  • Refactoring the function PS_GetFileHashes (Part 4)
  • 6 Customers and a Brain Freeze

• Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)

  • How to Select and De-Select an Item in a Listbox
  • Microsoft Access’ Latest Bug Highlights The Importance Of Your Update Channel!
  • Microsoft Is Disabling Default ActiveX Controls in Office 2024
  • Has Hell Frozen Over? The Feedback Portal Being Cleaned Up!!

• Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)

  • AEU33: Image / Photo Cataloguer in Access
  • Lock Selected Records in Continuous Forms
  • Unicode Input Box

• Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)

  • Throwback Thursday: September 12, 2024

Videos‌

• Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)

  • Adding & Removing Items (Immediately) to and from the Ribbon using VBA (01:39:27): with Adrian Bell

• Colin Riddington [Isladogs] (YouTube channel)

  • Lock Selected Records in a Continuous Form (08:42)

• Sean MacKenzie (YouTube channel)

  • Web Data Entry for Microsoft Access (21:49)

• Richard Rost (YouTube channel)

  • Text Box Margins (12:42): Align Text Boxes with Margins in Microsoft Access Forms: Dates and Currency
  • Same Product Twice (16:06): Detecting Duplicate Product Purchases by a Customer in Your Microsoft Access Databases
  • Title Case: Part 1 (20:09): How to Convert Text to Title Case for Movies, Books, and Songs in Microsoft Access
  • Title Case: Part 2 (16:16): How to Convert Text to Title Case for Movies, Books, and Songs in Microsoft Access, Part 2
  • Natural Sorting (12:38): How to Perform Natural Sorting in Microsoft Access for Mixed Alphanumeric Lists
  • Video Rewind (04:00): Computer Learning Zone Video Rewind for September 2024

• Daniel Pineault (YouTube channel)

  • Perform FTP Operations via curl Using VBA (48:38)

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.}

• September 19/20, 2024: Greg Regan - Control Tip Text (JUST ADDED - inaugural event for Access Express Australia) note that this is not a multi-day event, but the event date depends on which side of the international date line you live on...Thursday 6:30 PM US Pacific time; Friday 11:30 AM AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time)
• September 24, 2024: Maria Barnes - Modern Chart Improvements
• October 02, 2024: Alessandro Grimaldi - Drag and Drop: behind the scenes
• October 3, 2024: Ron McCarry - Using cached ODBC connection in Access with single sign-on
• October 29, 2024: Maria Barnes - Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities
• November 06, 2024: Chris Arnold - Tips and Tricks for Continuous Forms
• November 07, 2024: Greg Regan - Modern Access Interfaces
• November 20 (9:30 am - 4:00 pm): In-person UK AUG Autumn 2024 Conference, Oxford University (Steve Girling, Anders Ebro, Mike Wolfe, Peter Bryant) (JUST ADDED)
• November 26, 2024: George Young- Using Web APIs in Access
• December 04, 2024: Adrian Bell - topic to be confirmed
• December 05, 2024: Crystal Long and Geoff Griffith- Creating Add-ins that run in Access and Office
• January 8, 2025: Philipp Stiefel - topic to be confirmed
• February 05, 2025: John Mallinson - Using VBE_Extras Add-In with Access
• May 15, 2025 @ 9:30 am - 4:30 pm: In-person UKAUG Spring Conference 2025, Imperial College London (speakers TBA) (JUST ADDED)

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the last Week in Review (2024-09-07) and this one (2024-09-16).

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)