Office 2010 Technical Preview Ships

The only good thing about the EFFluent interface is that Microsoft are trying to patent it. So it means that OpenOffice, DB2 (Viper 2) and the like will not be infected. We are moving on from Microsoft now, we will continue to use Access 97 and Access 2003 in the interim. The SAA CUA interface still suits our corpoate clients especially on Laptops, Netbooks and especially on their various phones and other mobile devices. The Ribbon may be usable on my 26 inch OLED UHD screen (g) but it makes the laptop rather awkward to carry. Another old dinosaur signing out, goodbye y'all.

Mhnatt

You said you are “trying to avoid opening up the old ribbon debate” and yet you immediately went ahead and delved into it, bashing anyone who is against it ("dinosaur", “bad implementation” etc..). As one of the people who were in charge of the development of the ribbon said, its purpose was to help overcome the enormous number of commands and menus that have accumulated in the main office suit programs. Word for example has thousands of commands. Access also has many. Perhaps for this purpose it is logical to sacrifice some screen space. But applications that are built by Access seldom have so many commands; therefore the ribbon does not serve its original purpose when it comes to such applications. From replies to your post you can see that for some people it is useful, and for others it is not. (I assume some of the people like it because it has a fresh modern look, but the older menus could have been given a fresh look as well). Why not then offer a choice? Why not say: If you want it you can use it, if not then no worries? I quote your own concluding sentence: “("adding" while not taking away what we developers have depended on for many years).” You wrote this with regard to Sharepoint. Why then do you not have the same affect when it comes to the ribbon? Why not have it ‘add’ while not taking away what some developers have learned to depend on? You seem to be contradicting yourself. Gilad

Would it please be possible for Microsoft to give out some information on the new Web database functionality in Access 2010? If it is anything near as good as it sounds, it could be a major step forward for Access developers. Bearing in mind that there were lots of complaints about Access 2007 not having much new database functionality (as opposed to speeding up development using existing database functionality and the non-relational Sharepoint list connectivity of limited usefulness), a major improvement in web development within the familiar Access development environment would be a major boost. Am I barking up the wrong tree? If there is something major in the offing here, why is no-one giving us details? Alan

Sorry about hte delay replying to questions--I have been too busy this last week. @Donn - It is possible to hide the ribbon. Here is the article msdn.microsoft.com/.../bb258192.aspx. If your question is--Are we bringing back the old menus and command bars? That isn't part of the plan right now. It is really expensive from an engineering perspective to design, implement, test, document, and train people on two interfaces. @Pelle - Yes. There will be a 64-bit driver for reading mdb and accdb files. @Alan - Ah, shucks. I can't believe we missed you in Technical Preview. Thanks for the advice on what you are looking forward to seeing--the team will get more under the covers than we did in the Access 2007 intro blogs. We won't be talking much about Web databases until after the Office server products are more fully disclosed in October. I don't have news for you about Huron. There are some super cool scenarios that could come about. Things are still changing in the Huron world. When I feel comfortable about scenarios that the team will deliver--you will hear about it in the blog. For me the term "All-up" in context of the Office blog refers to content that is relevant to all the Office applications. For example they now have posts about Backstage and Send a Smile. You asked about the Web stuff. We won't be talking about it until fall when it is more actionable for a wider audience. @mhnatt - it was great having you join the team for 3 days a couple weeks ago. You have done a great job with ShoWorks. I expect data macros will be a favorite feature for many people. I need to get working on that post :-). @Tim - Use the email link above. I would love to understand why you are giving up on SharePoint. CyrusB - hey Cyrus. Data macros are standalone features. You don't need to have SharePoint to use them in your database. I would love to see some improvements in the VBA IDE as well. We did make changes under the covers to VBA this cycle to support 64 bit (more on that in a later post). There were not improvements to the IDE. I will pass along your feedback to the team that owns the code base. As for the future of VBA--I expect us to continue to support VBA in the next release. It is hard for me to imagine a release of Office that doesn't have VBA but that is my personal opinion. I can't talk about plans for Office 15 and VBA--we haven't started earnest efforts to plan the next release. The team remains focused on shipping Office 2010 with great quality.

Where is the Replication Conflict Manager in Access 2010?

@sevenflavor - the fact it is missing from the ribbon is a bug. We have fixed it in recent builds. You can get to all the commands in the outspace/ | Options | customization command well if you have short term needs.

Clint,

Thanks for your reply. I look forward to the public beta later! Alan

Are there any significant changes in system limits? E.g., can databases be more than 2GB now? Can there be more than 255 fields? It's a shame to have to rely on slow-but-capable Excel to present a huge amount of specified information for the user to browse/filter dynamically. (I'm thinking of the 255 column limit more than the 2GB limit here.)

"(I'm thinking of the 255 column limit more than the 2GB limit here.)" There is (almost) NO table in the universe that would need anything like 255 columns. In a properly normalised relational database design.

Welcome back Craig :-) What made you change your mind?

"Another old dinosaur signing out, goodbye y'all."

I too would be very interested to see if Access could get over it's existing 2GB mdb file size limit. While you can certainly break up large databases into multiple back ends, a new size limit of even 5GB would make that unnecessary in all but a few of my largest DBs....how about 10GBs ?? ;) J.

I've been playing around a bit with the preview.

Some of nice new things in there. I like the idea of these calculated columns and macro 'triggers', even though I understand that they offend some database purists. Pragmatically, they can be useful and will solve a lot of real-world problem for power-users. The issue I see now with these enhancements is how they will affect moving an Access back-end that rely on them to SQL Server. It seems to me that upsizing is going to become a lot more complicated unless there are good tools that can convert these new macros into equivalent behaviours. Too early to tell probably. The area that I find most disappointing is the VBA where I cannot see anything new or enhanced at all.

I guess we're going to stay stuck in 2001 for a while with this.

grovelli said: "What made you change your mind?" Well I am still going to defend the relational model on which Access (up to 2003) is loosely based. The implicit relationships hidden in the MVF in ACE are a dangerous departure, which may or may not have been exposed in the next version of ACE. I will continue to lurk in case Access ever gets back on the right path, but I am not holding my breath.

Renaud Bompuis said: "I like the idea of these calculated columns and macro 'triggers', even though I understand that they offend some database purists." Actually as long as the data redundancy is managed at the engine level they would conform with the model.

Renaud Bompuis said: "It seems to me that upsizing is going to become a lot more complicated unless there are good tools that can convert these new macros into equivalent behaviours." As a third-part tool vendor for upsizing products we will most certainly be looking into how all the new features in 2010 can be converted to equivalent features in SQL Server. So there will be people out there focused on these issues.