Towards the end of each month, Microsoft releases a changelog of all the features it added to Teams and Excel during the previous four weeks. It has already published its roundup for Teams, and it has now done the same for Excel for the month of February 2023.
Starting with Excel for the web, there is a single feature in the form of an improvement to PivotTables. Users can now manually sort rows and columns for PivotTables and PivotCharts through by dragging and dropping individual items.
Meanwhile, Excel for Windows customers can leverage two new capabilities. However, both of these are available for Insiders only. The first is an optimization which will see recalculations limited to the active workbook and its interdependent workbooks only. The other feature is the blocking of untrusted XLL add-ins for better security.
Lastly, Excel for Mac customers can take advantage of four new features. For starters, queries for local files, SharePoint, OData feeds, and more can be directly authored from the Power Query Editor. An even bigger improvement is that users on this platform can now import data from more sources, including XML and JSON files, OData, SharePoint Online List, Blank Query, and Blank Table. Microsoft has gone a step further with Insiders and allows them to connect to SQL Server databases, a highly requested feature. Finally, the recalculation optimization for Windows Insiders mentioned previously applies to Insiders on Mac too.
