Week in Review: May 10, 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.}

Maria Barnes (Business Data Bytes Newsletter)
- How do you know what to Automate: A guide to identifying which business processes are best suited for automation by evaluating frequency, complexity, error potential, bottlenecks, and scalability.
Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)
- [Untitled]: Discusses solutions for handling form validation issues when users attempt to close forms with unsaved changes in Access applications.
- Daily writing ideas: The author shares his approach to generating content ideas for his blog and asks readers what topics they'd like to see covered.
- Types of Microsoft Access Installers and Launchers I've built: An overview of various methods for distributing and updating Access applications, including batch files, launcher databases, and professional installers.
- Using combo boxes to select an entry and update form fields: A technique for using combo boxes with multiple columns to populate form fields without additional queries.
- Hiding duplicate records using running totals over a group: A method for selectively hiding repeating fields in Access reports using running sums and the Format event.
Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)
- Get a Drive's Name/Label Using WMI in VBA: A detailed tutorial showing how to retrieve drive volume labels using WMI in VBA with both early and late binding approaches.
- Access -- Playing With Database Properties -- Part 2: A comprehensive reference table documenting 69 different Access database properties with their names, descriptions, types, and configuration options.
Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)
- Using VBA to Create a Class Based on a Table with Adolph Dupré: A recap of Adolph Dupré's Access User Group presentation on automatically generating class modules based on tables to simplify CRUD operations and improve code organization.
- Throwback Thursday: May 8, 2025: A weekly roundup featuring links to five previously published articles focused on SQL Server operations like backups, database cloning, and server migrations.
- How To: Enforce Consistent Letter Casing in VBA: A solution to VBA's case-changing behavior using a brute-force approach with a dedicated class module that maintains canonical letter casing for identifiers.
- Proven Sales Strategies with Juan Soto: A summary of Microsoft Access MVP Juan Soto's DevCon Vienna presentation on positioning yourself as a premium Access developer and commanding higher rates.

Videos‌

Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)
- Leveraging SQL Server Stored Procs for Access, PowerApps and other interfaces. Can it be done? (01:43:43): with George Hepworth
Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
- Quick Queries #39 (25:49): Microsoft Access Quick Queries #39: Compact Runtime Version, Learn Normalization, Nested Subforms
- DISTINCT vs DISTINCTROW (14:15): When to Use Unique Values vs Unique Records (DISTINCT vs DISTINCTROW) in Microsoft Access
- BeforeUpdate and AfterUpdate (17:56): Learn BeforeUpdate and AfterUpdate in Microsoft Access with Appointment Conflict Check Example
- Popup Over Control, Part 1 (16:26): How to Open a Popup Form Over the Active Control and Return a Value in Microsoft Access
- Popup Over Control, Part 2 (14:11): How to Open a Popup Form Over the Active Control and Return a Value in Microsoft 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}^{. 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}^.

[May 13, 2025] Juan Soto: Using AI with SQL Server – what can be done? (JUST ADDED)
[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] Domenico Ruggiero: Orchestrating Office: Amplifying Access with Multi-Application Automation
[July 02, 2025] Colin Riddington: Large Monitor Support and Responsive Forms
[August 06, 2025] Pete Poppe: Faking ‘Non-Normal’ User Interfaces with Normal Data
[September 03, 2025] Adam Waller: Topic TBD
[October 01, 2025] Marcus Dieterle: High impact – Custom dialogs and mini-notifications (TOPIC JUST ADDED)
[November 05, 2025] Aleksander Wojtasz: Topic TBD

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2025-05-03) and this week (2025-05-10).

The roadmap was last updated on April 10, 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.

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

JUN 2025: Add zoom slider magnification to Microsoft Access: Access will add magnification slider (10% to 500%) in lower right of the application, similar to the feature in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. It will also be keyboard accessible and available on the ribbon.
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:

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)