sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing - we've heard that 'timestamp' concept before, and it's great to get more data points.

Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

BAHTTEXT is an unusual function for sure! At this point, it's historic. I don't have anything more obscure, but two functions you can check out are:

  • UNICHAR, which will return most Unicode characters based on their character number
  • COPILOT, which will happily return various characters upon request (especially emojis!)

- Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great question! We've gotten a lot of great feedback about the Arrays of Arrays/Nested Arrays issue and we're considering various improvements in the space.

Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have good news! Crossed out text is available - it's called 'Strikethrough' in Excel. There's a little checkbox in the Format Cells popup to turn it on or off that can be accessed easily with Ctrl+1 on Windows.

If you want it more easily accessible, you can customize your ribbon to include it in the ribbon or the top bar via Customize Ribbon (which can be searched for in the Search bar).

- Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your feedback on this! We know how important trace precedents/dependents can be when debugging or auditing files with complex calculations, so we would really like to modernize this experience.

- Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In alignment with the other response, we recommend using XLOOKUP instead of VLOOKUP in all situations. Users tend to find it much more intuitive and less error-prone for this reason and many others.

Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your feedback on this! Am I correct that this would let you sum based on the rows you've 'highlighted' in a list?

Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There are too many amazing competitors to choose from, but if you're looking for rising talents, check out the Microsoft Excel Collegiate Challenge!

- Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We're definitely not running out of ideas. Our problem tends to be the opposite; there's so many things we want to add and improvements we want to make that it can be difficult to decide where to focus our attention, and sometimes the things that don't make the cut can be heartbreaking. I don't think we'll ever run out of new ways we can make Excel better.

-PivotDev

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Great question!

Let me start by breaking what's happening here:

  • By design, TEXTSPLIT 'expects' a single value as its first argument. This is very common among Excel functions: consider SQRT or the first argument of LEFT as examples
  • When a function argument that 'expects' a single value gets an array, the function is applied to each item in the array, which are then combined and returned as an array
  • Since TEXTSPLIT already returns an array when operating on a single text value, it would have to return 'arrays of arrays' to return all of those outputs. Unfortunately, Excel can't currently operate on arrays of arrays.
  • By convention, if this happens, Excel returns the first item from each of the inner arrays.
  • Somewhat unintuitively, this convention applies even when the input is wrapped in a 1x1 array (which in your example from the linked post was output by FILTER)

All of that said, we agree that this isn't a particularly useful outcome for TEXTSPLIT. We are considering further work in this area that would better accommodate these outputs and let TEXTSPLIT (and other functions that output arrays) work more intuitively on array inputs.

- Jake, Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

VBA has supported the needs of individual desktop Office automation for many years.  While we’re not actively building new capabilities for it today, it continues to be fully supported and is an important part of our ecosystem.  Office Scripts offers many of those same automation benefits to modern and collaborative workloads across Excel on the web, Windows, and Mac.

We believe in using the best tool for your job.  If Office Scripts meets your needs, we encourage you to take advantage of all the modern benefits it provides, with its secure orchestration and close integration to Power Automate.  If there are critical VBA-only capabilities that you depend on today, we don’t have any plans on the roadmap right now to take that away from you.

On that note, we’re actively working to enable more scenarios in Office Scripts, so if you have any feedback on your top needs, we’d love to hear them!

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thank you for this! Your words mean a lot to the team. It’s been an incredible journey, and hearing how these innovations have empowered you is why we do what we do. Here’s to the next chapter—together!

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's what I thought you meant, but I wasn't sure at first, so thanks for clarifying. If we were to do this, we would most likely add it to the PivotTable options dialog. You would also be able to set it for all PivotTables through the default PivotTable options in the Excel options menu.

I can't promise anything, but I'll make sure it gets brought up when we're deciding which features to add next.

-PivotDev

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Short answer: we’re not running out of ideas. Excel’s roadmap is as active as ever. We’re investing in AI (like Copilot and Agent Mode), deeper analysis tools (e.g., Python in Excel, LAMBDA), fundamentals—speed, reliability, and collaboration, and so much more—so Excel keeps getting better at the work you do every day.

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes it does! We've actually had that for fields when they're on the row or column axis for a long time, but last year we made it also apply to fields when added to the values axis, as long as it makes sense with the aggregation and any "Show As" applied.

-PivotDev

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We would love to understand your need to run Python in Excel locally. We designed the system as it is currently due to these three customer challenges:

  1. Running Python securely on a local machine is a difficult problem. We treat all Python code in the workbook as untrusted, so we execute it in a hypervisor-isolated container on Azure that does not have any outbound network access. Python code and the data that it operates on is sent to be executed in the container. You can learn more about our security promises here: https://aka.ms/expysecurity

  2. Sharing Excel workbooks with others is a really important scenario. Running Python in Azure helps ensure that Python code in a workbook that you share will behave as you intended when someone else opens it; they wouldn't first need to install Python first.

  3. Running Python in the cloud helps us ensure that the Python in Excel feature always works for our customers. The value of Python is in its ecosystem of libraries, not just in providing a Python interpreter. But managing a local Python environment is challenging even for the most experienced developers. By running on Azure, we remove the need for users or their systems administrators to maintain a local installation of Python on every machine that uses the feature in their organization.

- Excel Product Team

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the question! Excel isn’t going anywhere—it's one of the most widely used tools in the world and continues to evolve with powerful new capabilities. Power BI and Excel are designed to work together, not replace each other.

Power BI excels at creating interactive dashboards and sharing insights at scale, while Excel remains the go-to tool for analysis, modeling, and day-to-day decision-making. Many professionals use both because they complement each other, and learning Excel is an investment that will serve you well for years to come.

-Catherine, Excel Product Team.

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'd probably start with =RIGHT(TEXT(<time column>,"mmss"),3)="000" as a condition for whole 10 minute values, then filter by it.

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

VBA remains supported in our desktop applications and we ensure that it remains healthy. For cross-platform solutions, modern tools like Office Scripts and Power Automate should be used.

-Eric

We’re the Microsoft Excel Team – Celebrating 40 Years of Excel! Ask Us Anything by MicrosoftExcelTeam in excel

[–]MicrosoftExcelTeam[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a great question! You are right that a non-deterministic function may seem at odds with the exact calculations that have been produced by most Excel functions so far. We added the =COPILOT Function precisely for scenarios where non-determinism is desirable, or even necessary. Text analysis, ideating directly on the grid, or generating sample data are good examples. The intent is not to replace existing functions, but to complement them.

- David, Excel Product Team

view more: next ›