Week in Review: July 12, 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-Sonnet-4.}

Access Forever
- Access Showcase: A Hybrid Application Manages Juries, by Tracy Smith (adapted by George Hepworth for AFo): A comprehensive jury management system used in 41 Arkansas counties that integrates Access with SQL Server, Amazon RDS, and web technologies to streamline the entire jury selection and courtroom management process.
Marcus Dieterle (LinkedIn Articles)
- 🎯 Developers Recordset Helpers -- Your little recordset toolbox for MS Access!: A VBA module that provides faster, more robust alternatives to Access domain functions like DLookup and DSum, plus new functions for listing, grouping, and checking existence using recordset-based approaches.
Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)
- Don't let a "perfect storm" get you down!: A personal reflection on managing unexpected disruptions to planned work schedules and choosing to enjoy life's interruptions rather than becoming frustrated by them.
- When life gets overwhelming… choose to stop.: A strategy for dealing with overwhelming workloads by analyzing time usage, evaluating priorities, and deliberately stopping non-essential activities through elimination, delegation, or automation.
- User Defined Types in Access VBA: A practical demonstration of using User Defined Types in VBA to encapsulate multiple related variables into a single object, offering a cleaner alternative to arrays or global variables when functions need to return multiple values.
Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)
- Version 2506 Causing Problems?: A warning about Microsoft Access version 2506 (June 2025) causing issues including slow closing times, macro import problems, and Chinese characters appearing in expressions, with advice to rollback and disable automatic updates.
Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)
- AEU41: Non-Normal User Interfaces with Normal Data: Details of a July 2025 Access Europe meeting where Pete Poppe presented techniques for creating non-standard user interfaces while maintaining normalized database structures.
- Monaco SQL Editor Improvements Now Rolling Out: Covers three major enhancements to the Monaco SQL Editor including partial query execution, automatic SQL formatting, and faster loading times.
- Monaco SQL Editor (UPDATED): Comprehensive guide to Access's new Monaco SQL Editor featuring syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, and detailed documentation of known issues and fixes.
- Tab Control Page Caption Alignment Issue: Explores a display issue where tab control page captions with ampersand shortcut keys shift right when Use Theme is disabled, with a simple workaround.
- AEU43: Version Control for the Sole Developer: Adam Waller presents how the free VCS Add-in brings version control benefits to solo Access developers, making it easy to track changes and integrate with GitHub.
- AEU44: High impact - Custom dialogs & notifications: Marcus Dieterle presents modern alternatives to Access's standard MsgBox and InputBox dialogs, including custom myMsgBox, myInputBox, myComboBox, and myNotification tools that support formatted text, images, and tables.
- The Development of an Icon!: Chronicles the evolution of the Create SQL Query ribbon icon from its initial simple placeholder to the final polished version released in Access 365.
Crystal Long (Ms Access Gurus | Access Access Newsletter)
- Word Show/Hide (update): An Access form tool that provides quick VBA-based control over Word document display settings like field codes, bookmarks, navigation pane, and rulers without navigating through ribbons.
Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)
- Throwback Thursday: July 10, 2025: A weekly retrospective featuring a 10-part series on safely converting complex VBA functions to lightning-fast SQL Server scalar functions plus insights on test-driven development for Access developers.

Videos‌

Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)
- Faking ‘Non-Normal’ User Interfaces with Normal Data (01:06:25): with Pete Poppe
George Hepworth (YouTube channel)
- From Access to PowerApps: Replicating Northwind: A series from one of the core team members of the Northwind 2.0 template redesign project.
  - Reusable PowerApps Code to Execute SQL Stored Procedures In-depth (13:05)
  - PowerFX Functions vs SQL Server Stored Procedures (16:15)
Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
- Quick Queries #48 (26:02): Bug Reports, Remote Access, Sub Name Conflicts, Tab Paste Data
- 1,000! (01:32): Milestone Reached: 1,000 Microsoft Access TechHelp Videos!
- Fitness Database: Part 1 (15:56): Build a Microsoft Access Database to Manage Your Fitness, Diet, Workouts, Calories, and Daily Meals
- Fitness Database: Part 2 (26:22): Food Table Design, Nutrition Macros, Food Form, Hyperlink
- Fitness Database: Part 3 (18:26): Food Group Table, Combo Box, Continuous Form, Query Alias
- Fitness Database: Part 4 (18:26): Add New, Food Group Filter Combo, Linked Forms

New to Me

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

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}^.

[August 06, 2025] Colin Riddington: New and Forthcoming Features in Access
[September 03, 2025] Adam Waller: Version Control for the Sole Developer – Why it Matters (TOPIC JUST ADDED)
[October 01, 2025] Marcus Dieterle: High impact – Custom dialogs and mini-notifications
[November 05, 2025] Aleksander Wojtasz: Topic TBD
[December 03, 2025] Adolph Dupré: Topic TBD (JUST ADDED)
[January 07, 2026] Ynte Jan Kundersma: Using Power Automate with Office Apps (JUST ADDED)
[March 04, 2026] Chris Arnold: Using Disconnected (In-Memory) ADO Recordsets in Access (JUST ADDED)

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2025-07-05) and this week (2025-07-12):

Add zoom slider magnification to Microsoft Access: Rollout start changed from JUN 2025 to SEP 2025
Modernize Access Forms and Reports to work well on Large Format Monitors: Rollout start changed from JUL 2025 to SEP 2025

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

SEP 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.
SEP 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)