Microsoft Overhauls Excel With Live Custom Data Types

Microsoft is overhauling Excel with the ability to support custom live data types. The Verge reports: You could import the data type for Seattle, for example, and then create a formula that references that single cell to pull out information on the population of Seattle. These data types work by cramming a set of structured data into a single cell in Excel that can then be referenced by the rest of the spreadsheet. Data can also be refreshed to keep it up to date. If you're a student who is researching the periodic table, for example, you could create a cell for each element and easily pull out individual data from there.

Microsoft is bringing more than 100 new data types into Excel for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscribers. Excel users will be able to track stocks, pull in nutritional information for dieting plans, and much more, thanks to data from Wolfram Alpha's service. This is currently available for Office beta testers in the Insiders program. Where these custom data types will be most powerful is obviously for businesses that rely on Excel daily. Microsoft is leveraging its Power BI service to act as the connector to bring sources of data into Excel data types on the commercial side, allowing businesses to connect up a variety of data. This could be hierarchical data or even references to other data types and images. Businesses will even be able to convert existing cells into linked data types, making data analysis a lot easier.

Power BI won't be the only way for this feature to work, though. When you import data into Excel, you can now transform it into a data type with Power Query. That could include information from files, databases, websites, and more. The data that's imported can be cleaned up and then converted into a data type to be used in spreadsheets. If you've pulled in data using Power Query, it's easy to refresh the data from its original source. [...] These new Power BI data types will be available in Excel for Windows for all Microsoft 365 / Office 365 subscribers that also have a Power BI Pro service plan. Power Query data types are also rolling out to subscribers. On the consumer side, Wolfram Alpha data types are currently available in preview for Office insiders and should be available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers soon.

Live Custom Data Types oooo

[oldgraybeard]

Sounds fun. Now all the Malware vendors can do an update cycle.

"Live" Data = More Data Snooping

[nuckfuts]

Excel users will be able to track stocks, pull in nutritional information for dieting plans, and much more, thanks to data from Wolfram Alpha's service.

And Microsoft will be able to track every bit of information you're interested in adding to your spreadsheet.

Too late for this election campaign

[Canberra1]

Would have paid a fortune to see this pushed in 6 months ago. The ability to snoop on peoples is 2nd to being able to read all their cloud emails. However it will be a great achievement to see all those untested backdoors in for the next election. Active content - what could possibly go wrong? Be it aliases or DNS misdirection, it only needs to happen once to get full control.

Does anyone..

[silverdr]

... still care about those "office" pieces? Seriously asking. For the last few years every customer and contractor I worked with used web based docs and sheets from that other company.

Re:Does anyone..

[AmiMoJo]

I'm desperately hoping they add more rows to Excel because our entire COVID 19 Test and Trace system depends on it.

Re: Does anyone..

[RightwingNutjob]

They'll add more columns too. Just pray you never get to column ANTIFA

Re:

[CaptQuark]

If I remember right, the problem was they saved the data as an Excel 97-2003 xls file type, instead of the newer .xlsx version. The older xls has a limit of 65,000 rows where the newer version stores up to a million. https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]

Re: Does anyone..

[Ecuador]

I stopped trusting Google sheets with anything other than trivial stuff after I opened a .CSV file a few months ago and it was missing a random row from somewhere in the middle of about 30000 rows. Seriously not a blank line or anything and no error message. I would have missed it if I had not first wc -l'ed the file to know what to expect and that missing row would have messed my project subtly. The actual line was not special it would disappear even when replaced with another. Excel was fine with it, but in the end I just did some perl on it instead...

Re:

[CaptQuark]

Your example doesn't give enough information to blame Google Sheets because it handles errors differently than Excel.

What was in the missing line? An unmatched quote? Wrong number of commas? Does Sheets drop any imported lines that have the wrong number of fields whereas Excel just puts an extra field in that row? If so, which behavior would mess your data up more?

You get kudos for doing a line count (wc -l) on the data before importing it into both Excel and Sheets, but this one example of importing

Re: Does anyone..

[Ecuador]

I already said the line was perfectly fine and I even replaced with a different one and I still had a missing line (I no longer remember if it was the same line number that was missing afterwards). The .CSV was a product of Text::CSV, I looked at the missing line myself. Missing data without any error message is the worst possible bug for a spreadsheet. Anecdotal, perhaps I should have kept the CSV at least, but I was so disappointed I just closed Google sheets and only used it for a couple of small tables

Re:

[flargleblarg]

Is it possible that the previous line (not the one missing, but the one before it) had some kind of syntax issue?

For example, in C, if you accidentally end a line with \, then the next line is treated as though it was part of that line. I don't know if Google Sheets's import function has any special character parsing, but it's something to maybe think about.

Re:

[Whateverthisis]

Are you kidding? Google Workspace (formerly Google Suite) has 59% market share, Office365 has about 40%.

People use Google's stuff because it's simple and they don't know better. But Google Wrokspace's suite of competitor apps has about 1/10th the functionality you get with Office365.

We use Office365 extensively because it's way more powerful. Sheets is too slow for even a tiny bit of data and lacks significant functionality, and slides is nothing compared to PowerPoint. In our company (which admitte

OOC?

[AncalagonTotof]

Did they just invent Object Oriented Cells? A1.firstName, A1.lastName?... OK, may be a little more ...

Dynamic link on static data

[manu0601]

Data can also be refreshed to keep it up to date. If you're a student who is researching the periodic table, for example, you could create a cell for each element and easily pull out individual data from there.

Weird example. How often do they expect periodic table data to change?

Re:Dynamic link on static data

[OzPeter]

Data can also be refreshed to keep it up to date. If you're a student who is researching the periodic table, for example, you could create a cell for each element and easily pull out individual data from there.

Weird example. How often do they expect periodic table data to change?

Well if you take into account the fundamental quantum nature of then world, then I'd say every time you looked at it /s

MS Needs to Dump Ribbon of Sadness

[BrendaEM]

The ribbon interface is an affront to all usability logic.

Coming soon to your office suite...

[Waffle Iron]

I'm sure that the next step will be for Microsoft to helpfully pre-populate all newly created spreadsheet pages with a dozen random "live cells" that contain ads, links to monetized games, and clickbait news headlines.

Re:

[kmoser]

Clippy could even introduce the change: "It looks like you're trying to get some work done. Would you like me to make random changes to your spreadsheet which will destroy your last four hours of progress?"

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Uldis Segliņš]

Correction: Orifarce.

Fix what is wrong, not invent a wow nobody asked

[Uldis Segliņš]

Even more headaches to find where your tablemonster has some problems hiding. Fix assuming half of data is date! And who needs Excel in 2020 anyway? I see no single use case, where other software isn't better, without the crabload of data maintenance problems Excel delivers.

Sup hearty from the trough of the mighty

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Have they fixed that 20 year old Excel bug where the screen locks and goes white, ne'er to return?

It seems to have grown recently, sometimes dragging Word down with it.

All this and no more screen caps of any videos, either. You rule, Microsoft!

The possibilites!

[Gabest]

Would you like to buy another cell? 10% off for 10 cells.

Bring back the dead meme... Yo dawg,...

[thegarbz]

we heard you like tables. So we put a table in your table so you access data while you access data.