Week in Review: October 18, 2024

Just Published

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

Articles

• Official Access Blog

  • Access fixes released in Version 2408 and 2409, by Linda Lu Cannon

• Mathieu Guindon (Rubberduck VBA)

  • Parentheses

• Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)

  • Quick tip: DAO.Database AffectedRecords property
  • TDD – one small change at a time
  • Sometimes you should just ask the customer
  • Debugging in databases with complex code

• Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)

  • Export Report to Excel Only Available As XLS Format
  • Using PowerShell to Save a Base64 String as a File

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

  • Relationships, Indexes

• Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)

  • Throwback Thursday: October 17, 2024
  • Using PRINT to Improve Safety of Live SQL Server Updates

Videos‌

• Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
  • Import Specific Sheet (19:07): Import a Specific Range of Cells from a Particular Excel Sheet Into Microsoft Access
  • ChatGPT Canvas (10:14): How to Use the New ChatGPT Canvas to Edit Documents and Code in Place
  • Subform: Goto First Field, Part 1 (18:11): Navigate Form Sections and Set Focus on First Field of First Record in a Subform in Microsoft Access
  • Subform: Goto First Field, Part 2 (14:13): Navigate Form Sections and Set Focus on First Field of First Record in Subform in MS Access, Part 2

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.}

• October 29, 2024: Maria Barnes - Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities
• November 06, 2024: Chris Arnold - An Image / Photo Cataloguer for Access
• 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)
• November 26, 2024: George Young- Using Web APIs in Access
• December 04, 2024: Adrian Bell - Custom Ribbons Using Command Bars (TOPIC JUST UPDATED)
• 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
• March 05, 2025: John Heaser - Source Control for Access & SQL Databases
• May 15, 2025 @ 9:30 am - 5:00 pm: In-person UKAUG 30th Anniversary Conference 2025, Imperial College London (Armen Stein, other speakers TBA)

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the Week in Review two weeks ago (2024-10-05) and this one (2024-10-19).

The issue with the Modern Chart Improvements seeming to go back to "In Development" at the time of last week's Week in Review appears to have been a caching issue on my end, though I had checked multiple browsers and thought I had forced a hard refresh on my main browser.

The roadmap was last updated on October 4, 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

• SEP 2024: Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities

Rolling Out

None.

Launched

• AUG 2024: Modern Chart Improvements
• NOV 2023: Making 32-bit Access Large Address Aware (LAA)