Excel now lets you put multiple values in one cell
Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Microsoft has introduced lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays to Excel, available today in Insiders Beta. Lists let you keep related values like project owners together in one cell while still filtering and calculating on individual items. Arrays in cells keep spilling formula results in a single cell, and nested arrays preserve hierarchical relationships. New functions FLATTEN, HAS, HASANY, and HASALL help search and reorganize this data.
For years, organizing that information in Excel meant spreading it across additional rows and columns or combining everything into text that was difficult to work with.
- thunderbong
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.
- tombert
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).
- m101
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)
- amanzi
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.
- walrus01
I wonder what impact this will have on the World Championship of Excel
- sehw
Is copy-paste still broken in Excel after that "security update"?!
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-kb5002914...
- Suppafly
This seems like it'd be some sort of April Fools announcement.
- jcoc611
The next step is to allow adding a spreadsheet into a cell, and introduce infinite zoom