Week in Review

Week in Review: June 14, 2025

Highlights include a series on implementing Accounts Payable in an Access app, orchestrating Excel/PowerPoint/Word from Access, and adding a timeout to MsgBoxes.

Mike Wolfe

Jun 14, 2025 • 6 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
- Invalid SQL Statement with Monaco in Version 2505, by Karl Donaubauer: Reports a bug in Access version 2505 where the Monaco SQL Editor incorrectly flags valid SQL statements containing German umlauts, accented letters, or Chinese/Japanese characters as invalid.
John Mallinson (The VBA Help)
- Get the application window handle in any app (well ... in Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint or Outlook): Provides VBA code to retrieve the application window handle across different Office applications, using the Application object properties where available and the FindWindow API for PowerPoint and Outlook.
- MsgBox with a timeout: Demonstrates how to create message boxes that automatically close after a specified timeout using the undocumented Windows API MessageBoxTimeout function, with both ANSI and Unicode versions.
Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)
- Working in an Agile way…: Emphasizes the importance of frequent customer feedback and delivering small, simple features quickly to keep projects on track and customers engaged.
- Manual test driven development: Describes a testing approach that follows TDD principles by manually testing behavior as code is developed, though without the automated test suite component.
- Dealing with complex SQL queries: Reflects on the challenges of maintaining and modifying complex multi-layered SQL queries and suggests using SQL functions and stored procedures to improve readability and maintainability.
- Guiding principles: Outlines two core principles for database development: simplifying users' jobs and streamlining their workflow, ensuring solutions add value without creating friction.
Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)
- Power Automate -- Flow -- Review: A developer's candid assessment of Power Automate's strengths and frustrations, from mysterious failures to poor documentation support.
- How-to Extract All The URLs From a String: Two VBA approaches for extracting URLs from text strings using both Regular Expressions and pure VBA methods.
- Creating a Flow to Retrieve Submitted Attachments: A step-by-step guide for processing form attachments in Power Automate by retrieving files from URLs and building attachment arrays.
Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)
- Highlight Current Control Using Transparency: Demonstrates how to highlight the active control in continuous forms using transparency properties and border styling.
- Highlight Current Record Using Transparency: Shows how to highlight the current record in continuous forms by manipulating button transparency and border styles.
- AEU42: New and Forthcoming Features in Access: Presentation covering recently released Access features like VBA support for modern charts and Monaco SQL editor improvements, plus upcoming responsive forms and large monitor support capabilities.
Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)
- Update! Update! The Company is in a State! (with Karl Donaubauer): Karl Donaubauer's comprehensive guide to protecting Access applications from breaking Microsoft updates and managing the update bug lifecycle.
- Throwback Thursday: June 12, 2025: A weekly retrospective featuring highlighted articles about citizen developers and Access development wisdom from around the web.
- Professional Troubleshooting with Tom van Stiphout and Kim Young: Expert strategies for debugging Access applications, covering error handling, legacy system takeovers, and professional crisis management.

Videos‌

Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)
- Preparing your Access Database Application for Deployment (01:14:59): with John W Colby
- Orchestrating Office: Amplifying Access with Multi-Application Automation (01:21:16): with Domenico Ruggiero
Alessandro Grimaldi (YouTube channel)
- [Tutorial] Distributable file (14:06): How to create an Access library with common VBA functions to reduce code duplication among projects.
Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
- Quick Queries #44 (23:01): Overcoming the 2 GB Database Size Limit, Random Quiz, More!
- Accounts Payable, Part 1 (20:45): How to Track Vendor Payments, Bills, and Business Expenses
- Accounts Payable, Part 2 (19:53): Bills Table, Payee Combo Box, Continuous Bills Form
- Accounts Payable, Part 3 (18:33): Conditionally Format Bill Form, Total Due on Main Menu
- Accounts Payable, Part 4 (10:54): Aged Payables Query, Past Due, Due in 30, etc.
Edcelle John Gulfan (YouTube channel)
- Keyboard Shortcut (05:51): How to add keyboard shortcut for command button of Ms Access.

New to Me

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

Fluent VBA

From the GitHub project readme:

Fluent VBA is an object-oriented fluent unit testing library for VBA. This project was inspired by Fluent Assertions in C#.

Fluent APIs are intended to be read like natural language.

I'm a fan of fluent APIs in specific circumstances. Unit testing is a great use case for fluent APIs. I've written a few articles covering the concept, which you can find at the link below:

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: New and Forthcoming Features in Access (Slightly modified topic)
[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 (2025-06-07) and this week (2025-06-14).

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)