Microsoft's Plans for Access Oct '25 – March '26

A slide shown by the Access team in its AEK session

At the German Access Developers Conference AEK27 the Microsoft Access team reported on its current work and plans in a live broadcast on October 18, 2025. Linda Cannon, the product manager for Access, presented a long list of work items, many of which were still relatively far off and difficult to assess. In a subsequent email discussion, Linda provided the more predictable points in the following list:

Expected Access engineering priorities through March 2026

1.	Continued focus on monthly issue fixes, security, customer-reported bugs, etc. to improve product quality, security, reliability, and relevance. Most of our engineering hours are spent here.
2.	Large monitor support: Remove 22” limitation to support using Access on modern hardware.
3.	Large monitor support: Enable zoom slider magnification for forms.
4.	Large monitor support: Modernize forms to work well on large monitors.
5.	Time allowing, we’ll continue to work on remaining large monitor support features (support zoom in reports and design layout, automatic zooming, support multiple monitor scenarios)
6.	If we still have time left over in the semester, we will begin work on Git integration for source code management in Access. (Spec is in progress. We will likely roll this out in phases also beginning the second half of 2026.)

My interpretation based on information provided by the Access team and a few years of experience:

Item 1 concerns the ongoing maintenance of Access. At Microsoft and within Microsoft Office, security and worldwide compliance are very important issues, and Access is fully affected by this. Since the Access team is small, a large part of its working time is spent on these maintenance tasks. If unexpected requirements arise in this area, planned new features are postponed, sometimes by several months.

This is what happened with the Zoom Slider and Large Monitor Support features, which were originally announced for early summer 2025. First, they were postponed until this fall in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, and now it looks more like the end of this year or the beginning of next year. They are deliberately not giving any more precise estimates, as these features are complex and there are the imponderables regarding maintenance work, see above.

The Access team has now combined the two items into one (very) large feature, which makes sense because they are closely related. As can be seen in items 2-5 of Linda's list, the individual sub-features are to be delivered gradually over the next months and into 2026.

For item 6 on Git integration, you can already tell from the wording that it's more of a declaration of intent for next year, when the big chunks of Large Monitor Support will be done.

In summary, it’s clear that Access is actively maintained and the Access team is working on new features with its limited resources. Adapting Access to modern resolutions and monitors is a very important feature and has been overdue for decades. Therefore, I would personally be glad if it were available just one year after the original announcement. ;-)