The New Access Features in 2025

The online conference Access DevCon Vienna 2025 took place on April 10+11. There we had a very long session with the Access team from Microsoft with a 40-minute presentation and almost as long a Q&A with the participants.

The Access team presented a number of new features that they are working on or planning for the rest of 2025. From the almost 80 minutes of recording, I have shortened the highlights about new features into 2 videos of around 10 minutes.

In the first video, software engineers Sachin Arunkumar and Courtney Owen show the current state of development in 4 feature areas:

Command Line Code Signing

Access files can be digitally signed using the new /Sign command line switch. The advantages over manual signing via the VBE menu item are that the process can now be automated. In particular, this makes it possible to efficiently sign multiple Access projects in one go using a loop or patch file.

Monaco SQL Editor Improvements

Three improvements will soon be released for the new SQL Editor:

Quickly Launching

Until now, opening the editor has taken around 3 seconds each time. This delay is due to a problem in the underlying Edge browser control, which will take some time to resolve. The Access team is therefore implementing a temporary workaround by preloading the editor in the background when the Access file is opened. In the video, Sachin shows that the editor now opens almost immediately.

Better SQL formatting

The formatting of the SQL text in the Monaco Editor was previously only rudimentary, essentially it was keyword colouring. Sachin shows that the upcoming integration of an open source SQL formatter will raise the formatting to a higher standard, especially with regard to indentation and line breaks.

Execute Selected SQL Text

Many developers are used to being able to select and execute parts of the SQL text in SQL Server Management Studio and other editors. This will also be possible in the Monaco editor, which can be particularly helpful for testing and debugging long and compound statements (think of UNIONs).

Source Code Control Re-Integration

The Access team is planning a modernised version of the source code control that was abolished many years ago. At that time (until Access 2010) the MSSCCI API was used (often with Visual SourceSafe), now the focus is on Git integration. However, this feature is still at an early planning stage.

Modern Charts VBA Support

Finally, Courtney Owen shows an innovation in the recently extended VBA support for Modern Charts: The Modern Chart improvements from last year and the associated VBA support are currently only available in Access 365. The Access team has now added so-called stubs (placeholders), which at least generate a clean, understandable error message in older Access versions.

The second video is about the decades-long overdue adaptation of Access to modern resolutions and monitors. Two topics are presented:

Zooming in Access

Courtney Owen shows the status of his work on a zoom slider (and ribbon items) for zooming in Access forms. He makes it clear that it is not an easy job to get the idiosyncratic Access controls to zoom in and out correctly. Currently it largely works, with a few outstanding issues.

Courtney also describes the plan for the gradual expansion of the zoom slider. First form view, then report view, then datasheet view and finally design views, which we had repeatedly requested in the zoom plans, because we are all not getting any younger. ;-)

Extending the Form and Report Size Limits

Shane Groff presents his plans and the current status of increasing the 22-inch limits for forms and reports. He is working on expanding them several-fold so that there are virtually no limits on object and section widths and heights in the coming decades with Access.