Microsoft's Plans for Access Oct '26 – March '27

At the German Access Developer Conference AEK28 on October 10, 2026, Microsoft's Access team presented its plans for the next semester, i.e. the next 5-6 months until March 2027.

For a few years now, they have been referring to these as their "Engineering Priorities" and it's possible that a part of these plans may be postponed due to other, unforeseeable tasks. These delays are mostly caused by security and compliance requirements for Office, which naturally also affect Access and take up a significant portion of the Access team’s resources.

In the AEK session, they didn't announce major, unexpected new features, but rather a few things that had already been on the agenda, a new compliance requirement, and two minor new features.

The Engineering Priorities slide at AEK28

Item 1 is the usual maintenance work for Access, mostly bug fixes and security.

Item 2 concerns the phase-out of the old IE browser control, which was already announced for this year but has been taking longer than expected. There is still no specific timeline. A quick live survey of the more than 100 Access developers at the conference revealed that about 10% still use the IE control. The Access team also reported that their telemetry data still shows fairly frequent use of the control. They announced that they will post an early warning on their blog as soon as the date for deactivating the control is decided.

Item 3, the implementation of GIT integration for source control, was also on the list last year, but has been delayed, and there was still no demo during the presentation.

Item 4 is one of those typical compliance tasks mentioned above. It involves making adjustments to Office so that it works in the new "sovereign" French and German Microsoft clouds.

Items 5 and 6, the date picker improvements and the rounded control corners, were announced in April at Access Devcon and are expected to be released in the coming months.

Item 7 is the only one that is truly newsworthy. It concerns two new options for adjusting the font size in the macro designer and the expression builder. These will be handled in the same way as was done for the property sheet in August 2026. All three were previously fixed at an 8-point font size and therefore became increasingly difficult to read as monitor sizes grew. Now, they will be adjustable from 1 to 127 points. This change should be available within the next few weeks.

Courtney Owen demonstrating the new font settings

Aside from the engineering priorities listed, the Access team explicitly indicated during its AEK session that it is open to adding new "ad hoc" improvements that don't require too much effort to implement. So, if there's a little thing in Access that's annoying you, or if you have an idea for a small improvement, feel free to suggest it in a comment here so we can discuss it and possibly pass it on to the Access team.