Many organizations all across the globe use Microsoft Excel as their spreadsheet software of choice, and even for the purpose of displaying visualizations, in some cases. Microsoft regularly adds new features to Excel and also publishes a roundup of recent changes at the end of each month. While this summary is typically released near the end of each month, the company has published the latest one early, likely due to the holiday period kicking off next week.
Starting with Excel for the web, we have Formula Suggestions where SUM, MAX, MIN, AVERAGE, COUNT, and COUNTA functions might be recommended to you after you type in the "=" symbol. These suggestions will be based on Excel"s contextual awareness of your data. Similarly, the Formula Fill functionality will ensure that if you"re performing a repetitive task for each cell in a range, a formula to automate the filling of the remaining cells will be suggested. New locations will also be suggested if Excel determines that the cloud link in your workbook is broken. Moreover, you can now find queries through a search bar and insert images as a part of the worksheet using the IMAGE function.
Moving over to Excel for Windows, users can look forward to the same IMAGE function capabilities along with the Alt + F12 shortcut to launch the Power Query editor. Meanwhile, Insiders can nest Power Query data types and leverage Dynamic Arrays as a data source for transformation and loading when using the "Get Data" functionality.
Finally, Excel for Mac customers only have a couple of new capabilities to take advantage of this month. The first is the same IMAGE function described for Excel for the web while the other is the Option + F12 shortcut to launch the Power Query editor.