First Published 7 June 2024             Last Updated 10 June 2014

Recently, the Access team announced two major new features in the Microsoft 365 roadmap that many Access developers have been requesting for a long time.


This is excellent news!

Both items were demonstrated by Access team members to the Access Devcon conference in April 2024.
Videos of each presentation have since been released by Karl Donaubauer on his YouTube channel

       

       

For those who cannot wait for the official release dates to the Current Channel, early versions of both features are now available to try out for some users in the Office Insiders Beta Channel.

NOTE:
a)   You will need Access 365 version 2407 build 17730.20000 (Beta Channel) or later.
b)   Currently the features are only available to users in certain languages / locales such as the USA and the UK. Other locales will receive the features shortly.
c)   These are NOT final versions. Some features are not yet ready and, like all beta software, you will experience bugs. Do NOT use on your production machines

This is a brief outline of what to expect:



1.   New 'Monaco' SQL Editor

      Monaco is the fully featured SQL editor from Visual Studio and will include syntax highlighting, intellisense and autocomplete.

      Comments will be supported (but are not yet working properly).

      This will be the new environment when any query is opened in SQL view. Here are some example screenshots of the new SQL editor:


      The Access team want feedback from Beta Channel users in order to make the final product as good as possible when it is released to the current channel in a few months.

      UPDATE 10 June 2024
      I have done some testing with the new editor and have found several major issues which I have reported to the Access team. These are now being addressed.
      As this is currently a work in progress, I do not intend to list the issues I have found at this stage.

      However, at my suggestion, the feature has been temporarily disabled until the main issues are fixed.
      Feedback from the Access team suggests this will happen at some point in the next fortnight. The feature will then be re-enabled remotely.



2.   Modern Chart Improvements

      The charting package called 'Ivy' that is currently used in Excel, Word and PowerPoint is being integrated into Access.
      This will help support requests for better data visualisation in Access

      Improvements will include several new chart types as well as additional functionality / flexibility with existing modern chart types

      The modern chart ribbon dropdown now includes several new chart types: radar / box & whisker / bubble / doughnut / funnel / scatter


      From my limited testing so far, the modern chart improvements appear to be more stable and closer to a final release stage.

      However, additional chart types are still under development and are expected to be included before this feature is released to the current channel.



Summary

I hope this brief article will encourage some of you to try out the new features on a test machine and to provide feedback to the Access team.

I may add additional information to this article both in the coming weeks and after the general release to the Current Channel in late summer / autumn.



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Colin Riddington           Mendip Data Systems                 Last Updated 10 June 2024

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