Microsoft regularly adds new features to Excel throughout the course of the month, but at the end of each month, it also publishes a handy list of all the capabilities it added in the past four weeks. With August coming to an end, the Redmond tech firm has now penned another blog post summarizing all the new stuff it added to Excel across various platforms in this month.
Starting with Excel for the web, 14 new text and array manipulation functions have been introduced, including TEXTBEFORE, TEXTAFTER, VSTACK, HSTACK, CHOOSEROWS, and CHOOSECOLS. Those who want aesthetic text customization can also take advantage of new options in the Excel ribbon to play around with rich text formatting. It is now possible to sort cells by color as well.
In terms of data manipulation and visualizations, new operations can be run on Power Query Groups and the integration between Excel PivotTables and Power BI datasets has been tidied up too. Files with legacy data connections can now be edited, including those which use the legacy shared workbook feature. Elements is charts can now be deleted in an easier fashion through the delete and backspace keys, and the formula bar can be expanded to view multi-line formulas with better readability as well.
Coming over to Excel for Windows, we have the same 14 text and array manipulation functions referenced above, rolling out to Current Channel. Insiders on the Beta Channel can also use the IMAGE function to insert images into cells, along with the same Power BI enhancements mentioned above. Another nifty feature is the option to track changes in a workbook, which is very useful in collaborative environments. Right now, this is only available for Insiders in the CC Preview Channel.
The rest of the platforms have some of the same changes so we will only list them as bullet points below:
- Excel for Mac
- New Excel Functions
- IMAGE function (Insiders Beta)
- Show Changes (Insiders CC Preview)
- Android
- New Excel Functions
- IMAGE function (Insiders Beta)
- iOS
- New Excel Functions
- IMAGE function (Insiders Beta)
If you are not happy with the behavior of a particular feature or want new capabilities added, you can directly let Microsoft know by sounding off your thoughts through the dedicated Feedback portal here.