Microsoft Excel gurus, your prayers have been answered — more than one value can now be in a single cell as a new era of spreadsheets dawns

For decades, Microsoft Excel cells have been designed to hold just one value. However, Microsoft has just unveiled a major update that allows users to store multiple values, such as comma-separated lists, within a single cell. This represents a significant shift in the spreadsheet software's capabilities, opening up new possibilities for organizing and manipulating data.

The new feature is now available in beta for Windows and Mac users, with Microsoft explaining that each value in a list will be treated as a separate entity within the cell. This means that users can still leverage Excel's core functions, such as filtering, even when working with multi-value cells. While the cell can now contain multiple values, users will still need to manually insert the list from the menu, specifying the appropriate delimiter (comma or semicolon) to separate the items.

To support this new functionality, Microsoft is also introducing four new functions: FLATTEN, HAS, HASANY, and HASALL. These functions will enable users to interact with and manipulate the lists stored within cells. Notably, the changes are still in the beta stage for Microsoft Excel on Windows and Mac, and some known issues have been reported with features like conditional formatting, charts, and find & replace.

As the software continues to evolve, Microsoft's roadmap suggests that Excel will continue to expand beyond its basic number-handling roots, embracing more complex text entries, AI interactions, and coding capabilities.