Week in Review

Week in Review: March 14, 2026

Highlights include news about the Rubberduck VBA project, a video on building custom chatbots with RAG, and a free 5+ hour intro to SQL Server for Access users.

Mike Wolfe

• 5 min read
Week in Review: March 14, 2026

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-4.5.

Videos‌

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.

  • [March 27, 2026] Access Day (in person in Redmond, WA):
    • Armen Stein: Start and Grow Your Consulting Business
    • Mike Wolfe: Long-Term Care for Access: Taking Over an Existing Application
    • Rochelle Long: Managing IP rules for Azure SQL Server from within your Access Application
    • Andrew Richards & Peter Bryant: GraphAuthenticator - the “New Outlook” problem solved and a world of possibilities to explore
    • Juan Soto: Using AI as your Access Development Assistant
    • Access Team (Linda Cannon, Shane Groff, Courtney Owen, Sachin Arunkumar): Access News and Demos of New Features
  • [March 31, 2026] Maria Barnes: Interfacing with the Outlook calendar
  • [April 1, 2026] Peter Cole: Using vbWatchdog with Access
  • [April 16-17, 2026] Access DevCon Vienna (virtual)
    • Access Team (Oleg Ouliankine, Linda Lu Cannon, Shane Groff, Courtney Owen, Sachin Arunkumar): News from the Access Team
    • Karl Donaubauer: Access Community Update
    • Juan Soto: Using AI as your Access Development Assistant
    • Alessandro Grimaldi: Ribbonizer, the Ultimate Access Ribbon Creator
    • Mike Wolfe: Practical twinBASIC: Use Cases for Access Developers
    • Andrew Richards & Peter Bryant: GraphAuthenticator
    • Kevin Bell: Stop blaming Access – turn SQL Server into your secret weapon
  • [May 6, 2026] Tim Finch: Grid Lanes
  • [June 3, 2026] Kevin Bell: SQL Server Tips and Tricks for Access Developers
  • [September 2, 2026] John Mallinson: Working with the Windows API

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2026-03-07) and this week (2026-03-14).

The roadmap was last updated October 15, 2025.

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. Dates listed are "rollout start" dates.

In Development

  • OCT 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.
  • DEC 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

None listed.

Development Priorities

"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.

The items listed below reflect Microsoft's order of priority and were published in the following Access Forever article, Microsoft's Plans for Access Oct '25 – March '26.

  1. Continued focus on monthly issue fixes, security, customer-reported bugs, etc. to improve product quality, security, reliability, and relevance. Most of our engineering hours are spent here.
  2. Large monitor support: Remove 22” limitation to support using Access on modern hardware.
  3. Large monitor support: Enable zoom slider magnification for forms.
  4. Large monitor support: Modernize forms to work well on large monitors.
  5. Time allowing, we’ll continue to work on remaining large monitor support features (support zoom in reports and design layout, automatic zooming, support multiple monitor scenarios).
  6. If we still have time left over in the semester, we will begin work on Git integration for source code management in Access. (Spec is in progress. We will likely roll this out in phases also beginning the second half of 2026.)

Special thanks to Karl Donaubauer for posting the updated priorities at AccessForever.org.

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

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