Access News – AEK26 – Access Team

The latest edition of the Access News video series is about the German Access developer conference AEK26 with a condensed version of the Microsoft Access team session and some other information from the conference.

In this article, I will only list a few points that I consider to be the most relevant news for Access developers from the video. If you are interested in a specific topic, you can jump directly to that point in the video using the table of contents in the video description on YouTube.

Microsoft Access Team

1. In the section on the Modern Chart improvements, a key statement (and demo) was that there will soon be VBA support for all new chart types and all new properties. In the Q&A, Courtney Owen was asked whether major and minor gridlines could be formatted differently. As announced by the moderator ;-) this feature is already in the latest beta version now.
   

2. In the section on the Monaco SQL Editor, there was no new information compared to Colin Riddington's always up-to-date AFo article. Currently there are two extreme opinions: some people love the new editor, others turn it off because of the many issues it still has. We have reported to Microsoft that many people find it cumbersome that the option to switch the new editor on/off only applies at database level instead of at Access level. The Access team, on the other hand, has announced several fixes for the editor in the near future.
   

3. There is a separate AFo article about the Access team's plans for the coming months. In the video Shane Groff reveals details about Large Monitor Support. On the subject of (re)integrating Source Code Control features, he was asked about the reasons for this plan. If you're interested in the topic, check out the Access Team's answer in the video's Q&A section.
   

4. In the Q&A, there were other interesting answers from the Access team, e.g.
   

   There is no major progress on the New Outlook mitigation front. At least team leader Dale Rector said that the Outlook team intends to support Simple MAPI. The Access team is not planning to integrate Copilot in the next six months.
   

   In the security settings of several Office 2024 applications, ActiveX controls are disabled by default. Shane Groff received applause when he clarified that Access is not affected by this change. ActiveX controls are still enabled by default in Access 2024.

Access Community

There were innovative presentations at AEK26, which are only briefly mentioned in the video, including the world premieres of two products by third parties:

5. Alexander Denz showed the Access add-in for his SDOpenAI Assistants. A tool that uses AI to manage the knowledge of companies/organisations or larger projects and to convey it “intelligently” via assistants.
   

6. Juanjo Luna showed an experimental version of twinBASIC for Applications (tBA) that could advance the VBA editor and some aspects of VBA about 25 years. See also our AFo article on the earlier proof of concept.