Future of Access (2 Viewers)

[isladogs]

I don’t agree about this being a valid concern.

Although I don’t agree with the decision to remove VBA support from New Outlook, it was a somewhat unique case.

Over the years MS had created multiple versions of Outlook, for PC and Mac, both desktop based and web based. This meant there were multiple code bases to maintain which was expensive in terms of developer time. The Office Watch blog has written about this extensively.

Rationalising all of those into a single code base made sense, even though the end result is far from satisfactory as far as developers in Access/Excel etc are concerned.

Access is different. It is desktop PC only. One code base only. One of its main selling points is its ability to work with a very wide variety of file formats using automation. Removing that functionality would completely change its purpose in a negative way and have no financial benefit for MS. Therefore it won’t happen

 

[Isaac]

Sure hope you're right
Then you also have to consider AV software that some aggressive IT departments maintain. I once worked at a place where when I ran code that automatically created a BAT file - the instant the textstream was Closed, the .bat file was zapped - it disappeared. All it would take is some AV software to prohibit vba and we'd be toast.

Another thing to think about is AI. AI why, you say? Because I believe that the future looks a lot more like people being expected to achieve a high level of productivity by way of utilizing AI as often as possible/reasonable. And from my experience so far, AI is pretty terrible at VBA, whereas it has devoted tons of resources to perfecting its responses on, for example, Python (to the extent that it actually creates its own python scripts behind the scenes to accomplish things!). So what I'm saying is if AI leaves Access in the dust, a lot of people might leave Access in the dust, because the world is slowly going in the direction where "what's within the scope of good responses from LLM's" will be a deciding factor in what to use.
Of course, theoretically, there is no arbitrary limitation on AI and AI can and should provide help in VBA. But my point is, similar to Microsoft's position on VBA, it's definitely NOT a favored language, in fact it's a disfavored language and that influence is not going to do us any good as the general direction of things