Week in Review: February 8, 2025

Just Published

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

Articles

^{*Article descriptions generated by Claude-3.5-Sonnet.}

Access Forever
- Quick Action by the Access Team, by Karl Donaubauer: Documents recent examples of Microsoft's Access team quickly implementing community suggestions and bug fixes.
Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)
- Tabbed view – tabs vanish in Access: Describes a bug where Access navigation tabs disappear when closing a form while switching from a report in print preview mode.
- De-duping characters from strings in VBA again!: Discusses alternative approaches for removing duplicate characters from large strings in VBA, highlighting the LimitConsecutiveSubstringRepetition function.
- VBA function to de-dupe spaces from a string: Presents a simple VBA function to remove consecutive spaces from strings using Replace in a loop.
- Design Pattern – COMMAND for Access VBA: Demonstrates implementing the Command design pattern in Access VBA with examples of email command execution.
Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)
- Understanding and Managing Microsoft Access Shift Bypass: Explains how to manage the Shift Bypass feature in Access that allows users to bypass startup options and AutoExec macros when opening databases.
- How-To Restrict An Access Database To Only Run From A Specific Folder: Demonstrates how to implement security measures to ensure an Access database only runs from a designated directory.
- Microsoft Access's Rounding vs. Traditional Numeric Rounding: Explains the differences between Access's banker's rounding method and traditional mathematical rounding.
- An Nz() Function For All Applications: Provides a custom implementation of Access's Nz() function for use in other VBA applications.
- What a Sad Day!: Comments on the 47th U.S. President's decision to impose tariffs on Canada.
- Rubberduck Site Down?: Investigates and resolves access issues with the Rubberduck VBA website related to HTTP vs HTTPS protocols.
Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)
- Show Font Dialog: Provides code for implementing a Windows font dialog in Access applications, including multiple approaches to font selection and a downloadable example.
Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)
- Bug Fix: Mousewheel Event Bug: Announces Microsoft's official fix for the MouseWheel events bug in Access version 2412, released across multiple channels in January and February 2025.
- Throwback Thursday: February 6, 2025: A weekly compilation highlighting past articles about VBA debugging techniques, focusing on the Watch window and its performance implications.
- DBeaver: Database Management Tool with Kevin Bell: Recaps an Access User Group presentation showcasing DBeaver's capabilities for database management and visualization, particularly its superior ERD features.
- Using Treeviews with Access with Pete Poppe (Maj P): Summarizes a presentation on implementing TreeView controls in Access, featuring a custom wrapper class that simplifies handling hierarchical data.

Videos‌

Colin Riddington [Isladogs] (YouTube channel)
- Modern Charts 1 (04:57): Programming Modern Chart Types
- Modern Charts 2 (06:47): Modern Charts - Change Series Options using Code
Sean MacKenzie (YouTube channel)
- Count Distinct (15:03): How to Simulate Count Distinct in MS Access
Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
- Quick Queries #26 (20:00): Microsoft Access Quick Queries #26: Normalizing Data, Distributing New Version, Subform Value, More!
- DAvg (14:43): How to Calculate Average Customer Worth with the DAvg Function in Microsoft Access
- Autosave While Editing (17:54): Enhanced Autosave in Microsoft Access Save Changes in Notes Without Losing Work
- Last Contact (21:01): How to Display a Customer's Last Contact Date & Last Order Date in Microsoft Access
- Remove Extra Spaces (17:21): How to Remove Extra Spaces, Tabs, & Line Breaks and Clean Up Long Text Fields in Microsoft Access
Daniel Pineault (YouTube channel)
- Shift Bypass (19:34): Microsoft Access Shift Bypass and How to Secure Your Database Against It
- Restrict Launch Location (15:07): Restrict A Microsoft Access Database To Only Run From A Specific Folder
- Does Table Exist? (06:33): Determine If a Table Exists In A Microsoft Access Database Using VBA
- Check Folder Permissions (08:36): Check User Folder Permissions Using VBA

New to Me

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

Nothing new this week.

Select Open Source Projects: New Releases

Rubberduck
- v2.5.92.6354-pre

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}^{. Not all links below include the start time and time zone. For that information, check out this handy reference guide from Access MVP Maria Barnes over at AccessForever.org:}^{Access User Groups 2025}^.

February 11, 2025: Juan Soto - Fixing slowness issues with Access and SQL Server (JUST ADDED)
February 18, 2025: Juan Soto - Introduction to forms, your window to your data (JUST ADDED)
March 05, 2025; Alexander Denz - AI Assistants – Bring your knowledge to the smartest AI models
March 06, 2025: George Hepworth - Eliminating Magic Numbers in VBA
March 28, 2025: Access Day: In-person conference in Redmond, WA (Mike Wolfe, other speakers TBA)
April 02, 2025: Anders Ebro - Using Class Modules in Access
April 10-11, 2025: Access DevCon Vienna (speakers TBA)
May 07, 2025: Colin Riddington - Large Monitor Support and Responsive Forms
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

No changes were made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2025-02-01) and this week (2025-02-08).

The roadmap was last updated on October 4, 2024. The development priorities were last updated at the German-language AEK conference on October 20, 2024.

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 Oct '24 – March '25.

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.

Continued Focus on Monthly Issue Fixes: (Monthly Issue Fix Blog) Improved product quality and reliability
Large monitor support for forms: Improved support of Access on the latest hardware
Integrated source control: Simplifying the process of building mission critical Access solutions

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)

Upcoming End-of-Life Dates

Here are the key end-of-life dates Access developers should track:

2029

[JAN 09] Windows Server 2019
[OCT 09] Access 2024 | Outlook 2024
[OCT 09 (or later)] Classic Outlook
- See "Edit 8/12/2024" at top of this article for official clarification that "both perpetual and subscription [i.e., MS 365] versions of Outlook will be supported until 2029"
- Support for Classic Outlook is guaranteed at least through 9 Oct 2029; it may be extended beyond this date

2030

[JAN 08] SQL Server 2019

2031

[OCT 14] Windows Server 2022

2033

[JAN 11] SQL Server 2022

2034

[OCT 10] Windows Server 2025

Ongoing

Microsoft 365 (with subscription)

Date TBD

Complete removal of VBScript from Windows OS (Microsoft Announces the Death of VBScript)