It’s Time We Gave the Microsoft Access IDE Some Love
Quick: when was the last time the Access Integrated Development Enviroment (IDE) got a new feature?
I can’t remember. While Access in general has gotten love from the Access team, in particular the new data connectors, its time we add SOME kind of new feature to the IDE, but which one?:
- Collapse procedures?
- Improved Searching?
- Intellisense for tables?
This month I’ll be discussing these ideas and more at our regular Access with SQL Server group meeting, to be held on Thursday February 15th, (note it will NOT be on our regular second Tuesday of the month), where I will welcome your suggestions and get the Access team to show some love to the IDE.
Please join me!
One more suggestion to improve the VBA IDE…
5. Improve VBA IDE: Find Box sizeable (Ctrl-F)
https://officespdev.uservoice.com/forums/224641-feature-requests-and-feedback/suggestions/33521035-improve-vba-ide-find-box-sizeable-ctrl-f
Here are some ideas I’ve posted up:
1.Improve VBA IDE: improved code coloring
https://officespdev.uservoice.com/forums/224641-feature-requests-and-feedback/suggestions/33383173-improve-vba-ide-improved-code-coloring
2. Improve VBA IDE: Highlight start and end of Blocks e.g. If/End If, With/End With, Do/Loop etc
https://officespdev.uservoice.com/forums/224641-feature-requests-and-feedback/suggestions/33383329-improve-vba-ide-highlight-start-and-end-of-blocks
3. Improve VBA IDE: Line numbering by default
https://officespdev.uservoice.com/forums/224641-feature-requests-and-feedback/suggestions/33383362-improve-vba-ide-line-numbering-by-default
4. Improve VBA IDE (MS Access): better integration with SQL Server for query development in Access Front End
https://officespdev.uservoice.com/forums/224641-feature-requests-and-feedback/suggestions/33383404-improve-vba-ide-ms-access-better-integration-wi
The “new data connectors” link is broken.
I definitely agree that the VBA IDE is painfully in need of an upgrade. However, you should note that the official position of the Access development team seems to be that comments on the IDE should be directed to the general MS Office team because the IDE is not an Access-specific feature.
For instance, see this post on Access User Voice:
https://access.uservoice.com/forums/319956-access-desktop-application/suggestions/11137938-give-the-vba-ide-a-major-overhaul-finally
Microsoft’s response:
“Suggestions related to VBA editor should be posted in the Office Developers User voice site here – https://officespdev.uservoice.com/“
Isn’t Access’ IDE shared with the rest of the Office suite? Then you’d have to have the other applications to change their IDE as well, wouldn’t you?
Hi Juan
just a couple of ideas what we need:
1. Support for bigint for data from SQL Server
2. Support for pivot tables/charts was removed , and it is a shame, put it back!
3. Support for SSAS data (nice to have)
Success with the meeting!
Regards
Maxim