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After 40 Years, Microsoft Excel Will Add Single-Cell Lists and Arrays

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2 weeks 1 day ago
Microsoft's senior product manager for Excel acknowledges that "Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell." But that's now changing with arrays in cells (as well as nested arrays) and lists. "You can create a list by selecting Insert > List or pressing Ctrl+J, then typing or pasting items separated by commas or semicolons, depending on your regional settings. Selecting the icon in the cell shows the individual values..." "With lists, you can filter by one or more individual items instead of whole text entries. Referencing a list returns all its values for calculations. For example, =B2 spills those values into separate cells..." "For the first time in Excel, arrays can exist natively in cells as values or as formula results. They can be any size or shape and can even contain other arrays. You can now keep the result of any spilling formula in a single cell by "wrapping" the formula body with braces { }." "Since the introduction of dynamic arrays, array results have spilled across cells — for example ={1;2;3}. Wrapping the original array with braces creates a 1x1 array around it, so instead of spilling to multiple cells, the array stays in a single cell. Braces have long been used to describe arrays in Excel and this extends that behavior by allowing multiple layers of braces. This gives you more flexibility when building spreadsheets. Instead of leaving room for a formula to spill, you can keep the result in one cell." "Arrays can now also 'nest' inside other arrays... Previously, a formula that produced an array of arrays would return a truncated result or #CALC! error. Now, supported formulas return the complete nested result... FLATTEN(array, [pad_value], [levels]) simplifies nested arrays by removing one or more levels of nesting..." Three HAS functions check whether values are in an array: — HAS(array, value) returns TRUE if value appears anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise. — HASANY(array, values) returns TRUE if any of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise. — HASALL(array, values) returns TRUE if all of the values appear anywhere in array, and FALSE otherwise.

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