Announced last week, Microsoft has been releasing new versions of their Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that will now run natively on Macs with M1. This means that the popular Office apps – including Excel – will run faster and take advantage of the performance improvements on the new Macs too. These new Office apps will be “Universal”, i.e. they will continue to run (as well as they ever did!) on Macs with Intel processors.

The last update for the year provides two long-awaited features available in Preview: small multiples, and DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services.

For those in Office 365 Beta, there is a fantastic announcement for Excel out today. After LET was made Generally Available just a couple of weeks ago, its sister function, LAMBDA, has been released into the wild. The power of this latest addition to the Excel family of functions cannot be overstated. This is going to REVOLUTIONISE how you build formulae in Excel. Model auditors are already scurrying for the hills!

March 2020 saw Microsoft announce a new Excel function, LET, for Office 365, albeit at the time of writing, only to the Insiders – now Beta – Channel. This allowed you to stop writing the same expressions time and time again in a formula or allowed portability of segments of a computation for different formulae. As Microsoft puts it, it’s “…names on a formula level”.

We know we have done it before with Smart narratives, but we think we have found another newsworthy item in this month’s Power BI updates. Not sure if doing this twice means it’s an anomaly though…

There are no anomalies in this month's updates - none that we've detected...

We have all been here. You have an Excel file and you need to unhide some hidden sheets. There are a few of them, and you know it’s time to get Repetitive Strain Injury.

There seems to be a bit of a theme to this month’s updates – it’s all about visuals...

It was October 17, 1979 when VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, was released. To commemorate this “historic” event, fellow MVP Debra Dalgleish created Spreadsheet Day back in 2010 (so this is the 10th anniversary, so to speak). This day has become synonymous with celebrating both the pros and cons of working with spreadsheet software.

Here’s a new one. As regular readers will know, Data Types such as Stocks and Geography have been available for a while, but many users simply aren’t aware of their existence. That’s about to change. Excel is going to get more bolshy and let users know when they have data in their workbook that could be enhanced by Data Types which will help users pull in external data to enhance the data they’re analysing.