Forum Discussion
NEW FEATURES
✅ Native TreeView Control
✅ Modern ListView Control
✅ Advanced Data Grid Control
- Grouping
- Filtering
- Frozen columns
- Multi-column sorting
✅ Drag & Drop Support
- Records
- Files
- Controls
✅ Native SVG Support
- SVG images
- Scalable icons
- Theme-aware graphics
✅ True Dark Mode
- Forms
- Reports
- Navigation Pane
- Property Sheets
✅ Native PDF Viewer Control
- Embedded PDF viewing
- Search
- Navigation
✅ Markdown Control
- Markdown editor
- Markdown rendering
- Documentation pages
- Help systems
I agree that many of these would be useful for Access developers. However, several are freely available or can be easily created now. For example
- Treeview and DataGrid can both be created using HTML in an Edge browser control as well as many other items
- PDF files can be viewed in an Edge (or legacy) browser control
- If you have Access 365, the entire Access UI including the navigation pane, ribbon and property sheet are already theme aware and show true dark mode when black or dark grey themes are used
- Forms can also be made theme aware. See my article Create Theme-Aware Forms in Access. The same approach would also work for report view though you really wouldn't want to print in dark mode!
- Some drag and drop functionality is available but it mostly requires code
SVG graphics support isn't available at the moment
Thanks for the suggestions,
but the code editor is 30 years old.
VBA might not be the most widely used language, but it is the most universal. Every programmer using Office 365 or 2024 uses it. I think it's time they created an editor for Office similar to Visual Studio Code.
It’s baffling that the world's most popular product still has such a primitive and outdated editor.
As for the suggestions to use the web to work around the issues that’s still just a stopgap solution.
I agree completely that the VBE is very outdated and needs a significant revamp. Strangely you made no mention of the VBE in your first two posts. The VBE is a common feature across all Office apps and is therefore outside the remit of the Access team.
You misinterpreted my comments about the use of the Access Edge browser control. Although a significant part of its functionality is to provide Web functionality, that is far from all it can do. It can, as stated, display PDF files perfectly. It can also create numerous items such as a treeview, calendar, Kanban board etc by the use of HTML, CSS and Javascript within Access. No need to access the Web for these items.
Finally, as stated, dark themes are already fully available in Access.