For 40 years, an Excel cell has held exactly one value.

One number, one date, one piece of text.

That's been the deal since before most of us opened our first spreadsheet.

Of course, that never stopped us from cramming multiple things into a cell anyway, like team members separated by commas, several products, or project names.

Then when it came to filtering or counting - we ran into trouble.

This week, Microsoft changed that.

You can now turn those comma-separated names into an actual list inside the cell, where every name is its own item.

You can even type 10, 20, 30 into one single cell and Excel can treat them as separate values. And yeah, you can sum them.

My first reaction was: "That's crazy."

This is one of those things that makes way more sense when you see it.

I made a short video showing you what’s changed.

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One note: It's still in Beta. It's a big change, so it might take a while before it's released to everyone (although these days you never know - Copilot changes are being released constantly). Either way, it’s worth a quick watch so you know what’s coming before it lands in your version of Excel.

Before we move on to Geeky News, a quick word from today's sponsor:

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🤓 Geeky News

🌈 Google Sheets keeps taking notes from Excel

Google seems to be on a mission lately to make Sheets work better alongside Excel, one small update at a time. Here are the latest two.

Manual calculations

Excel users have had this for decades: a switch to pause automatic recalculation so your spreadsheet doesn't recalculate after every single edit. Google Sheets is catching up.

You can now batch your changes, paste large blocks of data, or juggle several scenario assumptions when modelling, then trigger the recalculation only when you're ready to see the result.

It's also handy if your sheet uses volatile functions like random numbers or timestamps. Freeze the calculation and the numbers hold still while you present, instead of shifting under you mid-meeting.

It's off by default. Turn it on under File > Settings > Calculation Settings.

Custom sorting in pivot tables

Another recent change involves pivot tables.

You can now drag and drop rows and columns into whatever order you want. You're no longer limited to A-Z or smallest to largest (and vice versa). The custom sort persists even after refresh and filtering.

This also means that when you import an Excel workbook with a custom-sorted pivot table, Sheets keeps it instead of resetting.

Small feature, but if you've ever fought Sheets to keep a pivot table in a specific order, this is one less thing to fight.

Now, if Sheets is copying Excel's homework anyway... how long until it gets lists in cells? 🤔😅

👏 Python is not the goal

Lists in cells, Python in cells... there's a lot you can put in a cell these days. Ricardo recently finished Python in Excel For the Real World (congrats!) and shared this:

We're spoiled for choice when it comes to tools in Excel. The more of them you actually know, the easier it gets to reach for the right one instead of whatever you're used to.

See you next week,

Leila

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