If you’re like us, you probably have a lot of your working life with your head immersed in formulae.

Microsoft has just announced a significant improvement to one of spreadsheeting's oldest features: Manual calculation mode.

This month sees the release of ‘Insert Pictures into Cells’ and ‘Set Default Theme’ for Windows and Mac Insider users.

It seems a little quieter this month. Nevertheless, let’s get you up to date.

SumProduct is pleased to announce that two of our Directors, Liam Bastick and Tim Heng, have been re-awarded Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for Excel for 2023-24.

PivotTables allow you to easily create summaries, dashboards and reports, as well as aggregate information. Whilst data types and in-cell images are a powerful part of modern Excel, PivotTables have only been able to use a text description of these modern content types. Now, the images and data types come intact to your PivotTable rows and columns in both Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac. They also include the same interactions you have in your source data (image cards, data type icons, data type cards, etc.).

‘Formula by Example’ has now started to roll out to Excel web users. ‘Formula by Example’ looks for patterns as the user enters data in the worksheet. When it recognises a pattern, ‘Formula by Example’ offers a formula to fill the rest of the column with the recognised pattern.

Back in December last year, Microsoft announced ‘Formula Suggestions’ was beginning to roll out to Excel web users. Now, it is available to all web users with English set as their primary language (rules me out then: I use profane). Whether you’re new to Excel or have used it for years, ‘Formula Suggestions’ helps you create formulae more quickly and accurately by offering relevant suggestions based on your data and context. All you need to do is type "=" at the beginning of a cell, and Formula Suggestions will show you different formulae that you can apply to your data, along with a specified range.

The latest updates saw quite a few highlights. There is ‘Formula Suggestions’ and ‘Formula by Example’ for Excel web users. ‘Use Image’ and Data Types in PivotTables are now available for Windows and Mac Insider users, and ‘Generate an Accessible PDF’ is available to all Mac users.

FY2023 has been a good year for SumProduct. We’ve helped more clients than ever before, trained more people than ever before and told more bad jokes than ever before.