Microsoft has announced some improvements to the way formulas work in Microsoft Excel, introducing a new capability called Dynamic Arrays, which was first announced last year, but only available to a subset of Office Insiders.
In a blog post, the company mentions that formulas have always had a pretty significant limitation in its spreadsheet editor: each formula can only output data into one cell of the grid. To change that, Microsoft is introducing Dynamic Arrays, which lets formulas that return multiple values spill them out on the grid in the form of a list.
To go along with this new capability, there are a few new formulas that output more than one result, including SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, FILTER, SEQUENCE, and RANDARRAY. The UNIQUE formula, for example, allows you to select a list of cells with different values, and filter out any duplicates, returning a list of all the unique values in the cells selected by the user.
Dynamic Arrays are now available to all Office Insiders on Windows, and to those enrolled in the Fast ring on macOS. However, Microsoft says it plans to bring the capability to users across all the platforms where the Office apps are available, though it didn't say when we can expect broader availability.
4 Comments - Add comment