alt Hacker NewsExcel now supports multiple values in a single cell
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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.
Technically, this is a huge deal for Excel because it represents a fundamental change from the traditional one-value-per-cell model. From a practical usage perspective, though, it may not be as revolutionary as it initially sounds.
I was playing around with it this morning and tested it on a fairly large Excel model with lots of spillable dynamic arrays used as intermediate calculations. I was able to replace those spill ranges with arrays in cells, and all the formulas referencing those results continued to work nicely. In many cases, enabling it was as simple as adding {} around the existing dynamic array formula. That huge workbook immediately looked much cleaner without all those helper spill ranges taking up space.
I think that's where the immediate value is. It simplifies helper ranges and intermediate calculations, reduces potential #SPILL! issues, and makes complex models easier to build, understand, and maintain.
It could also be interesting when combined with LET and LAMBDA, allowing custom formulas to work with arrays without exposing all their intermediate results across the worksheet.
I think it will become considerably more useful, once it supports features like charts, Power Query, and data validation.
Over the years, I've seen many comments dismissing Excel. But as many people who've worked in enterprises know, Excel is a godsend for manipulating reams of data for non-programmers who can think analytically. Of course, complex formulae and extensive VBA functions become a tech debt over time. But implemented properly, it provides a solution which doesn't require huge management approvals and increases productivity.
I'm sure that these new features will find a lot of use amongst many people. And seeing these Excel innovations is heartening.
The next step is to allow adding a spreadsheet into a cell, and introduce infinite zoom
Interesting.
I wouldn't consider myself a "pro" Excel user. I think my comprehension would be on the higher end of "basic", or maybe the lowest end of "intermediate".
That said, in all the years I've used spreadsheets, I guess I've never really thought I needed more than one value in a cell. I never really seriously considered putting JSON or something in there, and have been ok with just using more cells instead (especially since Office 2019 when they added dynamic arrays that allowed spillover).
I wonder what impact this will have on the World Championship of Excel
It's funny how history repeats itself... from 61 years ago: Pick OS had multi-value fields... Not quite the same, but it was the "Excel", and so much more, at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system
I guess I am dating myself!
I genuinely believe this is the only revolutionary feature I’ve seen implemented in excel in the 30 years that I have been using it.
There have been obviously lots of change but nothing like this, incrementally adding functions etc but this changes the type system like nothing else I’ve seen.
Why does a blog page need three loading spinners at the top to load a couple of simple text banners asynchronously?! ... And this from one of the biggest software giants. We have fallen so far.
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.
I kind of wish most of LLM/AI dashboards out there just does it in excel/google sheets to have a normalized interface. One of key benefits of spreadsheets is almost everyone, technical or not have had some exposure to them.
Excel excels because if fills the 2D user interface. But not separating calculations from the tabular position in the UI is a historical failure and things like this is a band aid on that
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.
Excel now support lists and arrays as values in a cell, but it still thinks February 29th, 1900 is a thing because 40 year-old backwards compatibility?
This is a strange world we live in.
Backwards compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
I imagine adding this feature has cost many hours of development. Aren't there lower-hanging fruits to please Excel's users? What about allowing user-defined shortcuts? E.g. to edit a cell it's still either the mouse or F2, neither of which is comfortable on modern laptops.
Is copy-paste still broken in Excel after that "security update"?!
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-kb5002914...
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.
This seems like it'd be some sort of April Fools announcement.
Treesheets had this for over 15 years now. https://strlen.com/treesheets/
I'll wait for 4D Excel.
Having just learned R, it feels like Excel is feeling competitive pressure from R and so has implemented R's `lists` and `vectors` types. It will be interesting to see if it makes its way to ODS.
This is a huge change, but it's unfortunate they left out types. Imagine if they had Haskell style list pattern matching and pure function evaluation.
May end up in Visual Python
I think it’s pretty awesome! Nice to see old software innovating
That seems pretty wild to me
Wonder if it works with all the functions - most of which would assume one value
Excel is a fractal of bad design
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?
Some day maybe excel will be a proper database. Anyway, who uses Excel?
The real question is if Google Sheets will get these features.
How about adding the time dimension to Excel? https://www.xllmonte.com/
This is what horror looks like
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.
But can I use multiple slurp juices on a single cell?
This would violate 1NF in SQL.
In finance we had this in 1999…
Now it’s a bit too late imo.
Excel gone SIMD
This really feels like jumping the shark. But I'll admit I've run into cases where this would have been handy. I wonder if it'll be worth all the inevitable edge cases and footguns it'll create.
I used to say Excel was the only truly useful, well-designed piece of software Microsoft ever made. It's an amazing example of dataflow programming and for that reason alone it's worthy of study.
Alas, Microsoft has enshittified it. Excel used to be a standalone program, then they made it online with the offline version hard to find. I bought that offline version only to discover it would stop working if it didn't phone home to the mothership every 30 days. Now (at least for my Mac version) it has stopped working entirely, even if I let it phone home.
I probably have a cause of action against Microsoft for this, but life's too short to wade into a legal battle with a sewage company and Libre Office is available and I'm switching to Linux anyway.
Does it support dates from before January 1, 1900? (No)
Sigh.
[dead]
Oh great. More stuff to break the two decade piplelines in the poorly maintained VBA-scripted and now AI-infested sheets that control businesses.
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)