Week in Review

Week in Review: August 16, 2025

Highlights include the unexpected sunsetting of the built-in Salesforce ODBC driver, integrating AI tools into the Access dev workflow, and a talk on new Access features.

Mike Wolfe

Aug 16, 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.}

Official Access Blog
- Access announces removal of Salesforce ODBC driver in October 2025, by LindaLu Cannon: Microsoft will remove the licensed Salesforce ODBC driver from Access in October 2025, requiring customers to purchase third-party drivers to continue Salesforce integration.
Access Forever
- Wizard ActiveXs are Broken in 32 Bit, by Karl Donaubauer: A bug in 32-bit Access versions since build 19029.20136 causes ActiveX control errors in various wizards including text file imports and database analysis tools.
Jonathan Halder (Access JumpStart 2.0)
- My VS Code Setup Saga: Copilot, Cogent, and a Few Surprises: The author explores setting up GitHub Copilot and Cogent extensions in VS Code for Access development, encountering authentication challenges and discovering limitations in file workspace integration.
- Adventures in AI: My Quest for Smarter Development Tools: A review of AI coding assistants including GitHub Copilot, Augment, and Cogent, comparing their workspace integration capabilities and pricing models for development acceleration.
- Access Report Trick: How to Tell If You're Running as a Subreport: A VBA solution using error handling to detect whether an Access report is running as a subreport, enabling conditional display logic based on parent report context.
- When Your Access Power Users Want Subdatasheets--Here's the Fix: How to restore subdatasheet functionality for linked tables by creating local queries with proper parent-child relationships configured in query properties.
Daniel Pineault (DEVelopers HUT)
- Microsoft Announces the Removal of Salesforce ODBC Drivers from Microsoft Access: Microsoft will remove the built-in Salesforce ODBC driver from Access on October 28, 2025 due to security concerns, requiring users to purchase third-party alternatives.
Colin Riddington (Isladogs on Access)
- Monaco SQL Editor (UPDATED): A comprehensive guide to Microsoft Access's new Monaco SQL Editor featuring syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, and Visual Studio Code functionality, including known issues and fixes.
- Navigation Pane Helper Add-In (UPDATED): A free Access add-in that provides easy access to navigation pane options like view types and sorting with minimal clicks.
Mike Wolfe (NoLongerSet)
- Outside-the-Box Access UI Design with Pete Poppe (MajP): Pete Poppe demonstrates creative techniques for building Excel-like grids, scheduling interfaces, and interactive maps in Access while maintaining proper database normalization.
- Throwback Thursday: August 14, 2025: A weekly feature highlighting hidden VBA and Access features, including debugging tips, string concatenation techniques, and lesser-known development tricks.

Videos‌

Access User Group Recordings (YouTube channel)
- Leveraging ChatGPT for Incremental Development in Microsoft Access (01:11:23): with John W Colby
- New and Forthcoming Features in Access (01:18:34): with Colin Riddington
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.
  - Inventory Allocation (23:26)
Richard Rost (YouTube channel)
- Quick Queries #53 (17:58): Self-Join Relationships for Emailing Multiple Related Contacts
- Microsoft Access Fitness Database:
  - Part 20 (19:22): Handling Nulls With Referential Integrity, Add New
  - Part 21 (14:54): Synchronizing Meal Parent and Subform Records
  - Part 22 (13:52): Delete Button with Cascade Delete, Requery Button
  - Part 23 (16:04): Creating a Food Log Table with Hybrid Relational Model

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}^.

IMPORTANT NOTE: As of publication, the AccessUserGroups.org website was returning a 500 Internal Server Error. The information below is copied from two weeks ago (last week the events calendar was returning a 404 Not Found Error).

[August 26, 2025] Maria Barnes: Update on calling Microsoft Graph API from VBA
[September 03, 2025] Adam Waller: Version Control for the Sole Developer – Why it Matters
[September 04, 2025] Greg Regan: Updated Control Tip Text
[September 30, 2025] Crystal Long & Adrian Bell: Using Custom and Built-in Functions in Expressions
[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
[January 07, 2026] Ynte Jan Kundersma: Using Power Automate with Office Apps
[March 04, 2026] Chris Arnold: Using Disconnected (In-Memory) ADO Recordsets in Access

Access Roadmap

There were no changes made to the roadmap between the Week in Review last week (2025-08-09) and this week (2025-08-16).

The roadmap was last updated the week of August 9, 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.

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)