Micro X-ray fluorescence analysis (μ-XRF) is one of the newest branches of XRF, which has developed very rapidly since 1990. In this review, we first discuss a number of papers that describe advances in instrumentation and (calibration) methods that can contribute towards more reliable quantitative analysis using μ-XRF. This first part also includes recent papers that aim to characterize the heterogeneity of standards useful for calibrating μ-XRF set-ups.We then present a short overview of recently published papers in which the (semi-)quantitative nature of μ-XRF is exploited, including studies in which μ-XRF is compared to other microanalytical methods providing compositional information or is used in combination with other methods in order to characterize materials more completely.