Week in Review

Week in Review: April 5, 2025

Highlights include a new item on the Access Roadmap, integrating with Monday.com from Access, and a new commenting platform for NoLongerSet.com.

Mike Wolfe

• 5 min read
Week in Review: April 5, 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-3.7-Sonnet.

Videos‌

  • Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
    • Quick Queries #34 (13:55): Microsoft Access Quick Queries #34: Cascading Combo Boxes Q&A, Not In List Handling, More!
    • Drop-Down (19:44): The Right Way to Make Drop-Down Lists in Microsoft Access - Plus a Developer-Level VBA Trick
    • Big News! (03:02): Access Learning Zone - Big Announcement About the Future of This Channel!
    • Multiple Cascading, Part 5 (23:38): How to Make Multiple Cascading Combo Boxes in Microsoft Access, Part 5

Select Open Source Projects: New Releases

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. 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.

  • April 10-11, 2025: Access DevCon Vienna (Agenda - Registration - Speakers: Access Dev Team, Karl Donaubauer, Maria Barnes, Ynte Jan Kuindersma, Philipp Stiefel, Adam Waller, Colin Riddington, John Mallinson, Mike Wolfe, and Juan Soto)
  • May 07, 2025: Karl Donaubauer - Update, update...the company is in a state!
  • May 15, 2025 @ 9:30 am - 5:00 pm: In-person UKAUG 30th Anniversary Conference 2025, Imperial College London (Speakers: Armen Stein, Andrew Richards, Anders Ebro, Stuart Massey, Chris Arnold, Peter Bryant, Rod Gordon)
  • June 04, 2025: Colin Riddington - Large Monitor Support and Responsive Forms

Access Roadmap

The following changes were made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2025-03-29) and this week (2025-04-05):

In Development

  • JUL 2025: Modernize Access Forms and Reports to work well on Large Format Monitors: Remove the 22-inch size limit and modernize Access forms and reports work well on large format monitors and provide responsive behavior for different form factors.

The roadmap was last updated on April 3, 2025. 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.

  1. Continued Focus on Monthly Issue Fixes: (Monthly Issue Fix Blog) Improved product quality and reliability
  2. Large monitor support for forms: Improved support of Access on the latest hardware
  3. 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

  • JUL 2025: Modernize Access Forms and Reports to work well on Large Format Monitors: Remove the 22-inch size limit and modernize Access forms and reports work well on large format monitors and provide responsive behavior for different form factors.

Rolling Out

None listed.

Launched

NOTE: Dates listed are rollout start dates.

  • AUG 2024: Modern Chart Improvements: A top ask from customers is to modernize Access charts and to support better data visualization in Access. To satisfy this user request, we are integrating a new charting package called “Ivy” into Access. Ivy is a charting package written by the Office DVX team that is currently used in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
  • SEP 2024: Integrate Monaco framework to improve SQL editor capabilities: The Monaco Editor is the fully featured code editor from VS Code with standard IDE functionality such as syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, and autocomplete.

Upcoming End-of-Life Dates

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

2024

2025

2026

2027

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

2031

2033

2034

Ongoing

Date TBD

Never miss an article.

Sign up to receive a Sunday morning email with links and recaps of the seven articles published that week.
(I'll never sell your email. Unsubscribe any time.)


All original code samples by Mike Wolfe are licensed under CC BY 4.0