At our German Access conference AEK in mid-October, the Microsoft Access team reported on their work and plans for the next 6 months. As you can see on the picture from the presentation, they call them Access Engineering Priorities Oct'23 — Mar'24 and here they are again as text:
1) Continued Focus on Monthly Issue Fixes
(Monthly Issue Fix Blog) Improved product quality and reliability
2) Access becomes Large Address Aware
Removal of key customer error issue
3) Dataverse export improvements
Make it easier and faster for admins to migrate their data to Dataverse
4) Large monitor support for forms
Improved support of Access on the latest hardware
5) Modern Chart Improvements
Expanded support for the most popular chart types and options
6) SQL Editor Improvements Significantly improved SQL query editing experience
The numbers in front of the topics are important. Principal Engineering Manager Dale Rector emphasized that this is a prioritized list and it can happen that the items further down could come later due to time delays in the upper ones.
You can watch a condensed recording of the Access team's explanations and demos in the Access News video.
The video contains the following topics:
Engineering Priorities Oct 23 - Mar 24
Modern Charts Improvements
Large Address Aware (LAA)
Large Monitor Support
Open Queries directly in SQL View
Copilot for Access?
To keep the video compact, I left out some parts of the presentation, like the slide on point 3) which just stated that the performance when exporting Access data to Dataverse will be improved. Item 6) SQL Editor Improvements is missing because no details or demos have been provided in the session. In return, the video contains a few other important and current topics.
We will always report here in the AFo blog when one of the announced features is available in the Current Channel.