Week in Review

Week in Review: June 7, 2025

Highlights include a major ADP project rewrite, creating a WIA image manipulation class in VBA, and a new release of Maria Barnes's VBA-MS Graph project.

Mike Wolfe

Jun 7, 2025 • 5 min read

Just Published

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

Articles

^{*Article descriptions generated by Claude-Sonnet-4.}

Access Forever
- Terminal Services Application for Ice Cream Manufacturer, by Juan Soto (adapted by Maria Barnes): A case study of converting a major ice cream manufacturer's 19 Access ADPs to Office 365 format, featuring handheld barcode readers running Access through Terminal Services.
Crystal Long (Access Access Newsletter)
- Using IIf(), Choose(), and Switch() in Access expressions: An explanation of three essential Access functions for conditional branching in expressions across tables, queries, forms, reports, and modules.
Mathieu Guindon (Rubberduck VBA)
- Undoing and Redoing Stuff: A technical guide to implementing undo/redo functionality in VBA using command patterns and stack-based management to overcome Excel's limitation of clearing its undo stack when macros run.
John Mallinson (The VBA Help)
- Copy VBA code in colour: Introduction of VBE_Extras' new "Copy as HTML" feature that preserves syntax highlighting and formatting when copying VBA code for use in documentation and web pages.
Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)
- Copying and modifying code / forms / objects: Discusses the importance of refactoring and simplifying when copying and modifying code to avoid creating hard-to-maintain hacks.
- Two Form Filtering strategies: Compares automatic real-time filtering versus using an Apply Filter button for forms with slow query performance.
- Poking around to find new customers: Explores using LinkedIn and Alignable for finding new Access development clients and seeks advice on customer acquisition strategies.
- Setting up an automated Access App upgrade strategy: Details creating an automated upgrade system for a 9-app Access suite using SSE Install and file property checking.
- Sometimes one makes dumb mistakes 😛: Describes a debugging experience where DoCmd.Open caused unexpected behavior and was solved by using SetFocus() instead.
Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)
- VBA -- Read Write INI Files: Functions to read and write INI configuration files using pure VBA without APIs, ideal for storing user preferences that persist across database updates.
- Extracting the Decimal Part of a Number Using VBA: Simple techniques to extract just the decimal portion of a number using VBA, including both direct calculation and string parsing methods.
- Creating a VBA WIA Image Manipulation Class Module: A comprehensive class module that consolidates various WIA image manipulation functions for rotating, resizing, converting, and processing images entirely in memory.
Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)
- Throwback Thursday: June 5, 2025: A weekly retrospective featuring articles about VBA Collections and Dictionaries as data structures, plus programming humor.

Videos‌

Alessandro Grimaldi (YouTube channel)
- Sliders with MS Access (04:15)
- [Tool] Configuration Table Manager (06:27)
Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
- Quick Queries #43 (26:34): Dynamic Defaults, Copy Paste, User Security, Macros vs VBA
- Advanced Data Validation (14:09): Advanced Data Validation Techniques for Microsoft Access
- Attendance, Part 3 (15:20): How to Track Attendance in Microsoft Access: Students, Employees, etc., Part 3
- Attendance, Part 4 (13:54): How to Track Attendance in Microsoft Access: Students, Employees, etc., Part 4
- Attendance, Part 5 (16:39): How to Track Attendance in Microsoft Access: Students, Employees, etc., Part 5
- Quick Queries #42 (30:11): Is Access the Right Tool for the Job? Does Not Work. More.

Select Open Source Projects: New Releases

VBA-MicrosoftGraph
- Release 2.0
  - Expand to optionally use GrantType = "client_credentials", not just "authorization_code"
  - Add list emails
  - Add ability to have multiple attachments
  - Tighten up Recipient and Attendee lists to allow trailing ; and spaces
  - Add wait for Edge browser control to be ready to navigate

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}^.

[July 02, 2025] Pete Poppe: Faking ‘Non-Normal’ User Interfaces with Normal Data
[August 06, 2025] Colin Riddington: Large Monitor Support and Responsive Forms
[September 03, 2025] Adam Waller: Topic TBD
[October 01, 2025] Marcus Dieterle: High impact – Custom dialogs and mini-notifications
[November 05, 2025] Aleksander Wojtasz: Topic TBD

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2025-05-31) and this week (2025-06-07).

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)