Microsoft Access is Actively Being Developed!

I guess it’s true what they say, miracles do happen!

Microsoft has finally, after YEARS of MVPs begging them, started to promote some of the improvement they make to product so people actually can see that the product is being actively developed and isn’t on life support!

Why am I mentioning this? Well, for years now, we have seen little public official posts regarding Access development. The Access Roadmap is simply not maintained and goes months or years with no updates, the Access blog only seems to get posts about bug fixes and very few improvements or new features ever get a post made by Microsoft leading many to believe the product has been on life support for many years now. Several MVPs have done our best to make posts regarding new aspects, but of course this does not hold the same weight as an official Microsoft post and we scrape together the information we can, but can make omissions and mistakes as we don’t always have all the information.

What this means is we finally have an updated and official resource we can point fellow developers and most importantly clients which clearly highlights that Microsoft Access is alive and still evolving, in active development. So no more hearsay, no more take our word for it, we get the information straight from the horses mouth.

I’m expecting, okay let’s be realistic – praying, to see more resources promoting what they release in the future (now that we’ve seen this occur), but in less than 24hrs they updated their “What’s new in Access for Microsoft 365” page to include many of the recently added features and/or product improvements that had not visibility up until now.

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Microsoft Access Export Formatting Bug

I came across a thread on UtterAccess:

and it brought back some memories of work I did for a client where I had to deal with this issue.
 

The Problem

The issue is quite simple, exports, with the exception of PDFs, do not properly export all formatting.

Let me illustrate the problem, or at least one example of them.

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Microsoft, You’re Killing Me Here!

I’m seriously at a loss for words.

What the …
How in the name …

You just can’t make this crap up!

Once again, stubborn as I am and a sucker for punishment, I decided to try and help clean up the Feedback Portal by flagging off-topic feedback items in the hopes that it would facilitate Microsoft’s (I’m assuming the Access Dev Team’s) job to deleting the irrelevant posts.

So I did a quick test and isolated 2 off-topic items:

here they are as they appeared this morning:

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Modern Web Browser Iteration Bug

Software Bug

Today, I was preparing a demo db for a video I am hoping to make in the coming week and came across an odd issue with the Modern Web Browser.

Now, for full disclaimer, I haven’t done a deep dive into the matter. I simply identified the issue and implemented a workaround. So I don’t know if this is an issue with all cases, or just this particular site (I doubt it though).

I was trying to extract data from a site, so I created a variable representing all the matching span so I could then work with each one individually to perform other operations.

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Setting Font Color Based on The Background Color

I believe for a solution to truly be good a number of design considerations have to always be front and center when doing development. I wrote about some of those aspects in my article:

One of those elements is to use contrasting color between text and the background so things are legible. If users have to strain to read content, graphics, … then we as developers have failed.
 
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Microsoft Access Navigation Pane Rendering Issues

Software Bug

Just one more bug to add to the list, but I’ve been noticing rendering issues with the Microsoft Access Navigation Pane with lines & background color going beyond the boundaries of the Navigation Pane itself.

As shown in the following image, Access is drawing the Navigation Pane elements outside the Navigation Pane itself.

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