Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell(techcommunity.microsoft.com)
64 pointsby luispa3 hours ago18 comments
  • m101an hour ago
    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)
    • Yossarrian2226 minutes ago
      Its a paid add-on but @Risk gives the functionality you're looking for
    • Zarathustra3044 minutes ago
      What would this look like? Whenever I need something like that, I just stick each parameter in its own cell and use functions from there.

      I would love an easier way to communicate to tech/math-illiterate CEOs that worst case, average case, and best case are different things, but must all be planned for.

  • amanzi27 minutes ago
    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.
  • swader999an hour ago
    Reminds me of Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
  • lordnacho2 hours ago
    Users might see it as a good thing to have yet another feature, but this sort of type-softness is why Excel is bad. In general having every feature is a bad thing, you need constraints to design things, to have idioms.

    Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.

    • qubexan hour ago
      I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.
      • shakna43 minutes ago
        If you've got five minutes, you'll be able to crash their Python integration. Probably without trying to do so.
      • knollimar21 minutes ago
        won't you get nested arrays not supported? or maybe you thunk it out, idk
    • spbaar36 minutes ago
      Excel does not need to be as opinionated or portable as a programming language. This might actually be a lesser of two evils considering what type of user behavior it encourages. (I've heard a similar ethos behind certain design decisions of Go)
    • seemazean hour ago
      Microsoft is actively harming the laypersons comprehension of their data with 'features' such as this.

      Reasoning about the basic shape of data with real estate managers using the Btrieve[0] database on DOS (and then XP) in years gone by was noticeably more straight forward than wrangling the monolithic excel monstrosities encountered today.

      [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrieve

      • qubexan hour ago
        There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.
  • abtinfan hour ago
    I didn’t really appreciate excel fully until I worked at a company that forbid software development and had implemented a whitelist policy for executables. VBA was blocked too.

    Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.

    It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.

    This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.

    Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

    • wildzzz27 minutes ago
      I've worked at places like they. They did have a self-service app store you could use to install things. It also had an approval system for anything that cost real money for a license. Excel was the bread and butter for many engineers for a long time to make functional tools. The great part of Excel is you could make little GUIs with the tables, not exactly QT, but you could have labels and textboxes. We regularly used a tool up until 2020 that was originally created in Excel 97.

      MATLAB was the runner up for our tools but the good part about Excel was that every PC had it whereas MATLAB wasn't and also needed network access for the license (or else your program/department had to buy a node license). Later, many people switched to python since not everyone loves MATLAB and it's more of a real software language (and it's free) than what's effectively a very expensive calculator.

    • acc_29735 minutes ago
      Were you able to process truly large datasets? I worked at a very excel company once but we kept running into row limit issues when scaling workloads and eventually migrated almost everything away from it. What industry were you in at the time?
      • coliveira23 minutes ago
        The same thing that works for databases also works for excel. You shard the data and run your analysis on the set of shards in excel. It's not elegant, but can solve many problems.
    • echelon39 minutes ago
      > Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

      Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.

      • ebiester33 minutes ago
        You underestimate the task by multiple orders of magnitude. It would be a significant effort even to build it on libreoffice.
  • olav2 hours ago
    Treesheets had this for over 15 years now. https://strlen.com/treesheets/
    • drfloyd51an hour ago
      But treesheets isn’t used by millions of office workers across the globe. I doubt treesheets is know by 2% of the HN audience. So it just doesn’t make the news.

      Or was the point you knew an obscure fact about an obscure application?

    • qubexan hour ago
      And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?
      • NuclearPMan hour ago
        So?
        • qubexan hour ago
          I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.
  • bnjan hour ago
    I’ve recently been experimenting with OnlyOffice as a non-excel alternative that can still support a broad formula set and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised. I want to be able to use an open source spreadsheet system and onlyoffice is surprisingly robust.
    • Xirdusan hour ago
      Are you familiar with LibreOffice? Are there any advantages that OnlyOffice has over other open source spreadsheets?
  • infogulch2 hours ago
    About time! Should have done this from the start instead of spill. That and being able to index into the multiple values in a cell.
  • qubexan hour ago
    The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.

    And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

    EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

    • Sharlinan hour ago
      I'm sure someone has already coined a law something like this:

      The use of Excel expands until it fills the space of all use cases.

      • qubexan hour ago
        In a rigid lattice, aye.
  • blt38 minutes ago
    Codd wept.
  • oniony2 hours ago
    Weird, because I remember a job where we had arrays in Excel cells back in 2008.
    • tomrodan hour ago
      You could call a named range or ctrl+shift+enter to run an array command. You couldn't put a defined array in a single cell, it would read at text.
    • hyperlinerappan hour ago
      These arrays are IN A SINGLE CELL
  • drfloyd51an hour ago
    Excel just got a z-axis. Cool.
  • sublinear2 hours ago
    > Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels.

    This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.

    Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?

    • mlhpdxan hour ago
      I have, at the risk of being a meme, put spreadsheets in cells via OLE. It was glorious.
      • drfloyd51an hour ago
        Can you extract values from the embedded spreadsheets to do math in the host sheet?

        What was that syntax like?

  • pavel_lishin2 hours ago
    But can I use multiple slurp juices on a single cell?
  • 30 minutes ago
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  • netsharc2 hours ago
    Hah, AI-written summary? (Using Buzzfeed's 1-sentence-per-paragraph-for-fifth-grade-reading-skills style). The author is "msexcel, Bronze Contributor", and if I click the username I get a "Cannot find current user" (1).

    Anyway, adding an extra dimension on a 2-dimensional spreadsheet (rows, columns, and now depth)? Good luck with that.

    (1) OK it breaks for all usernames, I guess because it's Microslop...

    • dang2 hours ago
      Is https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insider... better? We could swap the URLs.

      Edit: I swapped the URLs.

    • knollimar2 hours ago
      You already had sheets in the workbook for depth
      • bnjan hour ago
        I’d like to be able to make a cell into a sheet… like a subsidiary schedule
      • drfloyd51an hour ago
        Not really. I get what you are saying, and with discipline you could emulate depth with sheets. But it would only be by convention and I don’t think many functions worked that way.
        • knollimar34 minutes ago
          Index does at least, which is pretty huge.
  • shaknaan hour ago
    Oh great. More stuff to break the two decade piplelines in the poorly maintained VBA-scripted and now AI-infested sheets that control businesses.
    • dang32 minutes ago
      "Don't be snarky."

      "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

      • buildsjets29 minutes ago
        This is a valid and well considered comment. It’s not your role to police opinion, dang.
        • dang5 minutes ago
          Quite! And fortunately I don't know what the opinion is.

          It turns out that, with practice, you can read comments along one axis and not another. And boy do we practice.

    • whalesalad38 minutes ago
      It’s good for the economy.
  • smalltorchan hour ago
    I didn't read this, but it could already hold tons of values in one cell? Can someone explain what they are 'supporting' now?