What would be a revolution in excel is if we could have probability distributions in cells. Right now all spreadsheets are fairly deterministic and we think that tells us something about the real world. Having an ability to make cells distributions (and then all resultant cells would be distributions too) would represent the uncertainty in the world better (and expose lots of interesting things like distributions of tails)

I was skeptical, but this looks genuinely useful. I can already think of some use-cases for this, e.g. a spreadsheet I was working on recently had a list of user, and then a comma-separated list of software apps they were using. It was a bit of a nightmare to parse, but the example in the article would definitely help with filtering the list.

Reminds me of Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

About time! Should have done this from the start instead of spill. That and being able to index into the multiple values in a cell.

I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.

Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.

It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.

This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.

Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

Treesheets had this for over 15 years now. https://strlen.com/treesheets/

I’ve recently been experimenting with OnlyOffice as a non-excel alternative that can still support a broad formula set and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised. I want to be able to use an open source spreadsheet system and onlyoffice is surprisingly robust.

The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.

And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

Users might see it as a good thing to have yet another feature, but this sort of type-softness is why Excel is bad. In general having every feature is a bad thing, you need constraints to design things, to have idioms.

Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.

Weird, because I remember a job where we had arrays in Excel cells back in 2008.

> Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels.

This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.

Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?

Codd wept.

But can I use multiple slurp juices on a single cell?

Excel just got a z-axis. Cool.

Hah, AI-written summary? (Using Buzzfeed's 1-sentence-per-paragraph-for-fifth-grade-reading-skills style). The author is "msexcel, Bronze Contributor", and if I click the username I get a "Cannot find current user" (1).

Anyway, adding an extra dimension on a 2-dimensional spreadsheet (rows, columns, and now depth)? Good luck with that.

(1) OK it breaks for all usernames, I guess because it's Microslop...

Oh great. More stuff to break the two decade piplelines in the poorly maintained VBA-scripted and now AI-infested sheets that control businesses.

I didn't read this, but it could already hold tons of values in one cell? Can someone explain what they are 'supporting' now?

It makes me gleeful to see Microsoft adding genuinely new and useful features to their standard products. Whether true or not, it feels like it's been such a long time..

So they added support for and a nice UI on JSON data types in database fields.

That may sound reductive and dismissive, but I think that's actually pretty cool and likely to make some things a lot easier.