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What's new in Access 2010
As always, it's Access which has changed most in Office 2010. Some of the new features are great (navigation bars, conditional formatting, a better expression editor), but at the end of the day, Access isn't and never will be an end-user product, and Microsoft should stop trying to make it one - the new macro editor is a case in point. That said, if you use Access regularly it is unequivocally worth upgrading to Access 2010.
Specific new or changed features in Access 2010 include:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - NEW MACRO EDITOR
Access has always supported two programming languages: macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). You now write macros in a different way, using a completely new macro editor which supports comments and groups of commands.
New/changed Access 2010 feature - WEB BROWSER CONTROL
The new web browser control allows you to view a website within a form (here we are looking at an old version of the Wise Owl website):
New/changed Access 2010 feature - NAVIGATION CONTROL
Another new feature is the navigation control, which lets you provide a simple way to move between different forms, without having a menu system:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - EXPRESSION BUILDER
The expression builder has long been a weak point of Access. It now includes Intellisense, and is better organised (although it's still not a patch on the Excel function wizard):
New/changed Access 2010 feature - CONDITIONAL FORMATTING
Microsoft have borrowed conditional formatting from Excel - you can now have as many rules as you like for a control:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - CALCULATED FIELDS
You can now include calculated fields within a table (previously you would have had to do this in a query). This would be useful, for example, for creating a FULL NAME field for this table:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - QUICK START FIELDS
You can create your own sets of quick start fields (here, for example, when you add an Address quick start field you get city, state and postcode fields too):
New/changed Access 2010 feature - RECORD-LEVEL VALIDATION
You can now set record-level validation rules within a table's design:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - TRIGGERS
You can attach data macros to a field in Access 2010, to create triggers:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - RETURN OF THE FILE MENU
There is a welcome FILE tab on the Access ribbon (Microsoft prefer to call it Backstage view), replacing the difficult-to-find Office 2007 button:
New/changed Access 2010 feature - OTHER NEW FEATURES
Other additions to Access 2010 include:
- You can now publish databases to websites, and share them using SharePoint
- You can turn portions of your database into reusable templates, using something called application parts
- There are lots more database templates, and you can customise these and share them
- As for the other Office 2010 applications, you can customise the ribbon
- You can now export reports to PDF or XPS formats
Here's how you begin to customise the ribbon in Access 2010, for example:
You can view a full list of changes in recent versions of Access by returning to our main Access version history page.