Microsoft's Access team is small. Nevertheless, some new features have been introduced in recent years, as you can read at Microsoft and in our Features section. In addition, we have frequently had positive experiences with the rapid implementation of change requests and we want to report on some examples.
Let's start with an improvement that was suggested by Access MVP Anders Ebro in 2023. He asked the Access team whether it is really necessary for the same warning message to appear every time linked tables are opened. The team responded promptly and since then there has been the Anders option in the warning message to turn it off.
In the same year, Colin Riddington asked about opening queries directly in SQL view. Colin was fairly new as an MVP at the time and didn't know that we had asked this several times over the years without success. His impartiality led to success, as the Access team introduced the Colin feature that same autumn.
The Modern Chart improvements were published in 2024. Both in the beta phase and later, the Access team promptly implemented many of our suggestions. As often, the ideas came partly from our own tests and partly from posters in forum or email discussions, from which we passed them on to Microsoft.
One example is gridlines, which were not yet available in the first beta versions, and later their more visible formatting and the visual distinction between major and minor gridlines. Other examples are improved sorting options and a few additional chart types. The Access team has even responded to Colin's defiant request to stop translating the Waterfall chart as Waterautumn chart in the UK English version. :-)
During the beta phase of the Monaco SQL Editor in 2024, we passed on the request from a video comment. A poster asked whether the new editor will be mandatory or whether it will be possible to continue working with the old editor. Fortunately, the Access team quickly implemented this request in the form of an option. As the editor had many serious bugs at the beginning, the disable option often proved to be a lifesaver. It is located in the wrong place and therefore has to be set for each database, but the fact that it exists at all is due to the community input.
We (largely Colin) have also suggested or brokered a long list of bug fixes and changes to the editor, most of which have since been implemented. As a result, the editor can now be used almost without problems.
A popular activity on this blog is the information about bugs. Here too, cooperation with the Access team is usually very good. Sometimes we would like to see faster fixes, but sometimes the team surprises us with their responsiveness. An example from the previous week:
On Sunday, someone posted in the Answers forum that the "Required" property of a field in a Sharepoint list is not reflected correctly in the linked table in Access. George Hepworth and I confirmed the problem.
On Monday, I reported it to Microsoft and Maria Barnes pointed out that it might depend on the caching settings in the Access options. She was right, and it helped the original poster to find a workaround.
On Wednesday, Courtney Owen from the Access team informed us that he had checked in a change that causes the list properties to be synchronized with the linked table regardless of the caching settings. After going through the beta channels etc. this change will be available in the Current Channel.
This is just one recent example of many of the team's quick and flexible response to our bug reports.
The Access team at Microsoft has a lot of maintenance work to do behind the scenes (Windows and Office integration, compliance, security, bug fixes, etc.). Therefore, it usually takes some time before major new features for Access are released. As you can see, however, the team is quite open to implementing suggestions for improvement from the community at short notice, if they are possible with relatively little effort and without major risks of interdependencies and regressions.
Based on our many years of experience and out of realism towards Microsoft, we on the AFo team - like many of the active and former Access MVPs - have a positive, constructive attitude towards the people who actually work on Access at Microsoft. In practice, this achieves more for the product and its users than whining about the stepmotherly treatment by the manufacturer.
Bottom line
We invite you to contribute with constructive comments on our articles or in forum and mail discussions, of course also by pointing out current problems or bugs. But please don't just cry, complain and moan bitterly, that always makes us so down. ;-)
Is this really the whole design team for Access? I mean, I know the product has been running mostly smoothly for the last couple of revisions, but I imagine there might only be only five designers or architects, but lots more developers needed to be working on it.
I have made suggestions to Microsoft in the past years for low effort adjustments with no response from them. Should I submit them again? Where is the proper forum for suggestions?