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

Edit: I swapped the URLs.

I’d like to be able to make a cell into a sheet… like a subsidiary schedule

Index does at least, which is pretty huge.

Can you extract values from the embedded spreadsheets to do math in the host sheet?

What was that syntax like?

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.

But can I use multiple slurp juices on a single cell?

These arrays are IN A SINGLE CELL

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.

Excel arrays are difficult to work with, exceedingly slow, and didn't have some basic formula support.

This looks like a very sane implementation, addresses some issues with traditional arrays (while extending them nicely) and implements those much-needed formulas.

If you've got five minutes, you'll be able to crash their Python integration. Probably without trying to do so.

I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.

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.

The flexibility of Excel is a lot of its value. If it wasn’t flexible like this then how could it be so widespread as a general purpose business tool?

Excel allows and embraces whatever mess you want to make.

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.

I suppose it shows that it's not an outright innovation in this space, for whatever that is worth.

Same applies to many of the more elaborate usages of Excel I'd argue. Only few dive deep

In a rigid lattice, aye.

To my knowledge, you still can't write an email client in Excel.

OK, maybe with plug-ins, but probably not natively.

Probably not.

Maybe.

Same thing

I’m a very occasional and casual user of office programs. Mostly I don’t use them.

What I like about OnlyOffice over LibreOffice is the UI. I like how it’s one program that can open all the documents rather than a collection of different programs as well. It feels clean, simple, and modern.

Sibling comment nailed my feeling on this: the UI of onlyoffice is modern and clean. To add on, it gives me a feeling of confidence that it can round-trip files back and forth from excel more reliably; a lot of people on my team also use excel and we need to exchange workbooks, so that was what prompted me to move on from LibreOffice when I lost confidence that files would be able to remain pretty stable going back and forth.

It’s good for the economy.

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.

You packed a lot of things in here! Let me try to tease them apart.

But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?

Of course it's fine. It's just a question of how. There were two problems with your comment: (1) it was snarky, which we're trying to avoid and which HN's guidelines ask you not do do; and (2) you didn't provide much information, so it came across as shallow. The combination of snarky and shallow is bad for the conversation we're hoping for.

It sounds like you have experience in this domain. If so, you could write an interesting comment about your experience (e.g. with spreadsheets, VBA, how they control businesses) and how the current release will break things. If you did that by adding details from your personal experience (anecdotes are king!) and avoiding snark, that would be more than fine.

Such comments, of course, take time to write. It's taken me 37 minutes and counting to write this one. (Edit: 45 minutes.) If you don't want to or don't have time, that's ok—just please refrain from snarky/shallow/indignant one-liners.

A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine

It's common (and understandable) that when people see comment A going unmoderated while their own comment B is scolded by a mod, they feel singled out for unfair treatment. I've described this in the past as "it always feels like the mods are against you" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

But there's a dirt-simple explanation: we don't see everything. Not even close! There's far too much for us to see even 10% of what gets posted here. When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest reason is that we didn't see it. You can always help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time)

What gets my attention are comments breaking the site guidelines. It's nothing personal! I didn't remember replying to you before, though once you mentioned it, I looked it up.

It goes against every bone in my Aquarian body to regard myself as a policeman, but the analogy somewhat holds in this case. Say you get pulled over for speeding. It's easy to feel you're being singled out: what about the cars that were speeding past you? do they just get a pass? But it's not personal. Policeperson is just sitting there doing their (no doubt rather boring) highway duty.

I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here

I gather that you perceive HN's guidelines as specifically American? I see them differently. They are an attempt at figuring out how to manage a large internet forum across national differences—and other differences—without degenerating into mutual clubbing (the caveman kind, not the dancing kind).

None of the HN moderators is American. The site was created by an American, but he was born in England and has been ensconced there for quite a while now. It's all more complex than one's assumptions imagine, and when you fire those at people, you can sting them. Even at internet distances.

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.

Its a paid add-on but @Risk gives the functionality you're looking for

Wow, this is incredibly cool. I can't believe this stuff hasn't been ported into Excel.

When I did Process Improvement we used MiniTab for this.

I honestly was not a fan of that program and would have loved to be able to use Excel, but there are so many statistical things you just can't do in it.

Would those then be tensors?

Matrices are Tensors but with the matrix product operator instead of the tensor product operator.

Pandas supports MultiIndex DataFrames but the pandas docs recommend xarray for 3D and N-Dimensional data.

xarray supports N-Dimensional data as for example NetCDF but not tensor arithmetic.

xarray_jax: https://github.com/google-deepmind/xarray_jax :

This library solves that problem. It registers xarray data structures as custom JAX PyTrees. This allows JAX to seamlessly flatten xarray objects into their raw arrays for accelerated computation and then unflatten the results back into fully labeled xarray objects, preserving critical metadata like dimension names and coordinates.

flatten and unflatten with datatypes is necessary for unrolling loops for performance.

Which is the correct logic for probabilistic logic, for expressions with frequentist or symbolic distributions as values? Are quantum logic and quantum statistical mechanics the appropriate or useful tools for all probabilistic logic?

dist_a1 <operator> dist_a2

uncertainties does mean±dev in Python with numpy types.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41411280 :

W3C CSVW supports per-column schema. ( with URIs for datatypes )

Serialize a dict containing a value with uncertainties and/or Pint (or astropy.units) and complex values to JSON, then read it from JSON back to the same types. Handle datetimes, complex values, and categoricals

IEEE-754 specifies NaN (null), ±0, three infinities (positive, negative, and unsigned), but IEEE-754 does not specify a representation for categoricals, datetimes (like ISO8601), or complex numbers.

XSD (XML Schema Datatypes), which RDFS vocabularies often use to specify the rdfs:range of an rdfs:Property, does not specify how to specify abstract complex numbers; but OpenMath RDF, and QUDT (Quantities, Units, Dimensions, and Types) and OM Ontology all have a way to save complex numbers to disk, too.

When I read this post earlier, I immediately thought, "don't cross the streams."

it's the Baghavad Gita, which Oppenheimer quoted. there's a wikipedia link...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#/media/File:Trin...

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

nooo Oppenheimer, you prevented needless world war

by having nukes we prevent world war 3, see british operation unthinkable

They already had that with 3D formulas. (Not even kidding... you can sum the same range across multiple spreadsheet tabs)

You underestimate the task by multiple orders of magnitude. It would be a significant effort even to build it on libreoffice.

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.

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.

The console in browsers is also very useful

Especially since it uses your cookies by default.

Excel on Mac does not have all the features. It does have most of them. It is also buggy.

Excel has kept many companies alive that ought to have sunk. It covers for incompetent CIOs and sclerotic management.

Blocking VBA (for security reasons) did wonders for process maturity because it forced funded implementation of programs. Now we have vibeslop we're going the other way.

I recommend you read the article. It's short, illustrated, and does a good job of explaining what's new, how it works, and how it extends existing Array functionality.

Codd wept.

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.

And something that isn't AI or an advertising opportunity…

Though they have been slowly adding useful new features to Excel (auto- spill is one I occasionally find to be both a time saver and a mistake reducer) for a few years now, after a long time seemingly doing very little with it. While I'm all for things having a "done" state and after that not doing much with them so as to not break a good thing, there is plenty of room for little improvements like new functions (admittedly many of them likely a bit niche) in Excel, just as long as they don't break what already works at the same time.

So they added support for and a nice UI on JSON data types in database fields.

That may sound reductive and dismissive, but I think that's actually pretty cool and likely to make some things a lot easier.

Excel gone SIMD

Is that a contradiction? Adding list and arrays doesn't break backwards compatibility. In general, guaranteeing backwards compatibility doesn't prevent you from adding new features, and having both old quirks and new features is fairly common for any decently old software

The next step is to allow adding a spreadsheet into a cell, and introduce infinite zoom

I guess I am dating myself!

at least you never have to worry about who pays

There are still 100's of organization still using MVDBs. Of those 1000's of multivalue professionals, I expect very few to peruse HN. There are dozens of us!

Some day maybe excel will be a proper database. Anyway, who uses Excel?

The real question is if Google Sheets will get these features.

This would violate 1NF in SQL.

Excel is a fractal of bad design

I wonder what impact this will have on the World Championship of Excel

https://excel-esports.com/

Is copy-paste still broken in Excel after that "security update"?!

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-kb5002914...

This seems like it'd be some sort of April Fools announcement.

- 404? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog

Lists and vectors have been around for a while. I dont think they suddenly started feeling pressure from those data structures after 30 years, coincidentally when you learnt about their existence

Also the people who would use R and who would use excel are completely different. They use both for the same thing but a user of one would rarely use the other

The other aspects is the new generation doesn't understand it. During interviews in marketing but also for a medical field expert, I often ask "make a small budget so you'll see how your bonus will work", and even the PhD, which is the top academic level, couldn't use a basic formula. How do they deal with data during a PhD? "In Prism", she said.

Same for marketing students and, although it's a lower academic level, they still need Excel for prospect lists.

Even as a programmer I find Excel pretty useful for anything involving numbers. The fact that everything is reactive allows for very fast iteration when testing stuff.

I wouldn't necessarily want to maintain a really complicated spreadsheet but I stop using spreadsheets once it gets anywhere near "complicated". It's still valuable for what I use for.

Does it support dates from before January 1, 1900? (No)

Sigh.

This really feels like jumping the shark. But I'll admit I've run into cases where this would have been handy. I wonder if it'll be worth all the inevitable edge cases and footguns it'll create.

This is a huge change, but it's unfortunate they left out types. Imagine if they had Haskell style list pattern matching and pure function evaluation.

Now add 2D lists...

Interesting.

I wouldn't consider myself a "pro" Excel user. I think my comprehension would be on the higher end of "basic", or maybe the lowest end of "intermediate".

That said, in all the years I've used spreadsheets, I guess I've never really thought I needed more than one value in a cell. I never really seriously considered putting JSON or something in there, and have been ok with just using more cells instead (especially since Office 2019 when they added dynamic arrays that allowed spillover).