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?

I have, at the risk of being a meme, put spreadsheets in cells via OLE. It was glorious.

Weird, because I remember a job where we had arrays in Excel cells back in 2008.

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.

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.

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.

won't you get nested arrays not supported? or maybe you thunk it out, idk

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

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)

Treesheets had this for over 15 years now. https://strlen.com/treesheets/

And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?

So?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you familiar with LibreOffice? Are there any advantages that OnlyOffice has over other open source spreadsheets?

Oh great. More stuff to break the two decade piplelines in the poorly maintained VBA-scripted and now AI-infested sheets that control businesses.

"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

This is a valid and well considered comment. It’s not your role to police opinion, dang.

Not really sure on this, dang.

A quote from the Baghavad Gita on this being a bad thing, is fine. But me pointing out all the infrastructure this will likely break, and how, is not?

Is it that I complained in the way I stated something? Because fine, if that's what keeps getting your attention (this isn't the first time), I'll try to Americanise the way I talk here.

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 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)

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

As a number of the comments have suggested there are a number of Monte Carlo methods (including this addin) but I was hoping that someone would make one which calculated based on random variables and output a resultant random variable, over brute force monte carlo. Monte Carlo is also somewhat slow, but doing the maths analytically should be fast.

Guesstimate (https://getguesstimate.com) has been around for years. I assumed Excel and Google would incorporate its features quickly, but it never seems to have taken off.

Features:

- All cells are named (auto named if you don't set them)

- Cells can have single values, many types of probability distribution, or sample data

- Formulas also produce distributions as first class outputs, because calculation is a Monte Carlo sim

- Each cell also has a pop-up box that invites you to explain your reasoning -- built in documentation

It got so much right. Sample data particularly useful because you can build a probabilistic bottom-up forecast and then update it with real-world data.

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

From this fact alone you can infer that 80-90% of people use excel as a glorified calculator.

And a glorified database, and chart making tool, and whatever business app they can hack together.

This is really amazing, and it reminds me of an Excel modification I did 24 years ago for an animation studio. They had around 3,000 digital artists and then about 200 support staff, and around 8 different productions moving through the studio at the same time. Each production was at some different stage of completion. The studio's production management staff spent a huge amount of time negotiating what staff was assigned to what productions, and the reasonings were all hazy and non-fact based. So I wrote what people would now call a deep learning system that mined all the accounting and production tracking records the studio had, and created probability distributions and confidence intervals for every individual and every task, and every combination of people and their combined tasks, and that all composited together into a giant predictive engine of real time whatif scenarios for the entire studio in different configurations.

It was used for a series of feature films you all probably saw: the Chronicles of Narnia series, the Scooby Doo live action CG films, the Garfield films with the CG Garfield, and Life of PI.

People both loved and hated it. They loved the insights into the studio's capabilities, and they hated thinking through how the thing operated, and they hated the thought process of constructing a new whatif scenario, because they had to THINK.

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.

The matrix product is not something specific to matrices, but it is a particular case of the contracted tensor product.

(While now almost everybody uses the names "tensor product" and "contracted tensor product", historically these names are wrong. Better names, which do not misuse the word "tensor", would have been "Zehfuss product" and "Cayley product", after the names of the mathematicians who have introduced them.)

The word "tensor" has become increasingly corrupted over the years. Originally, it had a meaning that matched its etymology, i.e. "tensor" meant "symmetric matrix", because a matrix could be decomposed through the polar decomposition into a tensor and a versor (i.e. a symmetric matrix and a rotation matrix).

Then what is now called tensor theory was created by Ricci, but without ever using the word "tensor". The meaning of the word "tensor" was changed by Einstein in his theory of the general relativity, where for unknown reasons he chose this word to refer to arrays with an arbitrary number of dimensions that satisfy a certain kind of transformation relationships when the systems of coordinates is changed.

After WWII, due to the huge popularity of Einstein, this weird usage of the word has become widespread.

Then for many decades tensors were just a subset of arrays, those that are changed in a certain specific way when the system of coordinates is changed.

Eventually, there was the second corruption of the word "tensor" which is completely unjustified, when "tensor" has become just a synonym for "array".

Vectors are 1-dimensional arrays (though originally, like tensors, vectors were only a subset of 1-dimensional arrays), matrices are 2-dimensional arrays and nowadays "tensors" means just "arrays", i.e. of an arbitrary dimension.

The tensor product and the contracted tensor product are defined for arrays of arbitrary dimensions. For 2-dimensional arrays the contracted tensor product is a.k.a. matrix product, and for 1-dimensional arrays it is a.k.a. scalar product.

yes. do you have a more useful meaning for tensors?

MLIR distinguishes arrays and tensors by allowing array mutation, but not for tensors; which allows a large class of optimizations

though the internal representation is one and the same

i understand it is the same for SIMD aswell (modulo alignment etc)

Reminds me of Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

Excel just got a z-axis. Cool.

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.

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.

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

Within 5 years (maybe less) a frontier LLM will be capable of completely cloning Excel based on Microsoft's product documentation. And I mean starting from scratch, not using the messy Libreoffice code base.

And I mean starting from scratch, not using the messy Libreoffice code base.

Given the libreoffice codebase is in its dataset, is that really from scratch?

I guess that means none of what a professional software engineer does is from scratch either, given that they're also trained on existing code.

Kind of hard to write code when you haven't seen a lot of it.

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?

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.

I didn't read this, but it could already hold tons of values in one cell? Can someone explain what they are 'supporting' now?

Codd wept.

It makes me gleeful to see Microsoft adding genuinely new and useful features to their standard products. Whether true or not, it feels like it's been such a long time..

Excel now support lists and arrays as values in a cell, but it still thinks February 29th, 1900 is a thing because 40 year-old backwards compatibility?

This is a strange world we live in.

Backwards compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

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

It's funny how history repeats itself... from 61 years ago: Pick OS had multi-value fields... Not quite the same, but it was the "Excel", and so much more, at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system

I guess I am dating myself!

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

https://excel-esports.com/

its been down hill ever since they broke the old meta with xlookup - this is yet another move aimed at the casual audience, designed to bring in the party gamers and makes the program a mess competitively

can you explain more about meta?

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

Same thoughts here. The comments in here make it sounds like a good idea. But isn't the whole idea behind excel (and any spreadsheet really) to have all data flat into sheets. For me the idea alone seems to break the whole concept

Keeping all values of a cell as scalars is literally First Normal Form in database normalisation; it brings myriad design benefits.

But Excel is not a relational database: for simple cases, having an extra table for a non-scalar column is awfully confusing to present to an end-user. From that angle this makes total sense. There's still 1NF for more complex embeddings, anyhow

Having just learned R, it feels like Excel is feeling competitive pressure from R and so has implemented R's `lists` and `vectors` types. It will be interesting to see if it makes its way to ODS.

Over the years, I've seen many comments dismissing Excel. But as many people who've worked in enterprises know, Excel is a godsend for manipulating reams of data for non-programmers who can think analytically. Of course, complex formulae and extensive VBA functions become a tech debt over time. But implemented properly, it provides a solution which doesn't require huge management approvals and increases productivity.

I'm sure that these new features will find a lot of use amongst many people. And seeing these Excel innovations is heartening.

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.

I'm one of those. Excel's ease of use isn't relevant if you already know how to use Python / Jupyter / DuckDB / whatever.

The mental model of describing a series of reproducible transformations on normalized tables is more intuitive to me.

Excel lets you do too many things. As a result, I mostly see spreadsheets that aren't much more machine-parsanle than a word document.

We had to write a score-table at a party lately, and a while ago, and I managed to get it working with DataSpell faster, than it took us to figure out how Google Sheets stupid date-parsing works.

I work at an airline where Claude is replacing data analysis tools like excel, data visualization tools like power bi, all that's left is dynatrace because it does it all automatically like Claude does. Many bespoke data processing or data analysis tools for non programmers are being replaced by Claude suscriptions, like excel, power bi, spss, tableau, those are the most used I think. No Python data analysis nor big data tools like pandas, numpy, apache superset are being replaced though

I would argue using Claude in replacing a spreadsheet is potentially more of a tech debt than the spreadsheet itself. Now if you would use Claude to build a point application that performs the same standard analysis it might be better, but only marginally so.

...an with Claude/LLMs you still cant be sure if there is some where a hallucinated mixup in some numbers, yielding wrong results:

If I select whatever datarange in Excel, I know I can rely on the numerical output.

Though, Claude became much better with this

So, Excel is just the poor man's shadow IT? I like that picture.

By the time it takes to make a custom filtered table non extensible UI for an api, the excel guy is finished three times over

It’s a common pattern in enterprise IT to take a useful spreadsheet and turn it into an application. Without fail, they turn into a forever chase of excel features re-implemented (and poorly) on some front end. Entire teams dedicated to features that would be two clicks away in excel ootb.

I mean spreadsheets are amazing, but excel is still a shitty piece of software (in my books)

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.

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).

I imagine adding this feature has cost many hours of development. Aren't there lower-hanging fruits to please Excel's users? What about allowing user-defined shortcuts? E.g. to edit a cell it's still either the mouse or F2, neither of which is comfortable on modern laptops.

Even more basic stuff like scrollbars that work sensibly, and not trying to second-guess what I type into a cell.

That seems pretty wild to me

Wonder if it works with all the functions - most of which would assume one value

Excel excels because if fills the 2D user interface. But not separating calculations from the tabular position in the UI is a historical failure and things like this is a band aid on that

I genuinely believe this is the only revolutionary feature I’ve seen implemented in excel in the 30 years that I have been using it.

There have been obviously lots of change but nothing like this, incrementally adding functions etc but this changes the type system like nothing else I’ve seen.