Continuing Financial Modelling is finally released in paperback format on Saturday 16 January (we hope!).

As I mentioned previously, LET was recently made Generally Available, followed by its sister function, LAMBDA, now released into the Office 365 Beta world. This function “completes” Excel and provides you with the ability to create your own reusable formulae.

Announced recently, Microsoft has made it possible to open multiple documents in Excel on iPad OS. With this latest update, you may take advantage of Split view for better multi-tasking on the iPad. It’s not just in Excel either: this feature is also available for Word and PowerPoint too.

Announced last week, Microsoft has been releasing new versions of their Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that will now run natively on Macs with M1. This means that the popular Office apps – including Excel – will run faster and take advantage of the performance improvements on the new Macs too. These new Office apps will be “Universal”, i.e. they will continue to run (as well as they ever did!) on Macs with Intel processors.

The last update for the year provides two long-awaited features available in Preview: small multiples, and DirectQuery for Power BI datasets and Azure Analysis Services.

For those in Office 365 Beta, there is a fantastic announcement for Excel out today. After LET was made Generally Available just a couple of weeks ago, its sister function, LAMBDA, has been released into the wild. The power of this latest addition to the Excel family of functions cannot be overstated. This is going to REVOLUTIONISE how you build formulae in Excel. Model auditors are already scurrying for the hills!

March 2020 saw Microsoft announce a new Excel function, LET, for Office 365, albeit at the time of writing, only to the Insiders – now Beta – Channel. This allowed you to stop writing the same expressions time and time again in a formula or allowed portability of segments of a computation for different formulae. As Microsoft puts it, it’s “…names on a formula level”.

We know we have done it before with Smart narratives, but we think we have found another newsworthy item in this month’s Power BI updates. Not sure if doing this twice means it’s an anomaly though…

There are no anomalies in this month's updates - none that we've detected...

We have all been here. You have an Excel file and you need to unhide some hidden sheets. There are a few of them, and you know it’s time to get Repetitive Strain Injury.