SumProduct is pleased to announce Tim Heng has been re-awarded Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for Excel for 2022-23. It’s a landmark for him too, as he racks up his fifth time in the Crazy Gang. Congratulations from us all here at SumProduct.

Microsoft has elected to “…enhance the signatures of the text functions…”.

Similar to the Power BI Updates, the Excel gang has commenced summarising recent updates in everyone’s favourite spreadsheeting software. We’ve no idea whether this will continue, but we thought we’d make hay whilst the sun shines and provide an overview of the features divulged across Excel for the web, Windows, Mac and mobile.

The latest set of updates finally sees the General Availability of the new Format Pane, plus error bars and information protection updates, table navigation improvements, Connect to datamarts and Power BI Data Storytelling features. But, as always (and of course!), there’s more.

This month’s highlights include the announcement of the General Availability of Canvas Zoom, more new Format pane updates and various new Preview features.

To keep Power BI’s users more informed, Microsoft has recently launched a new Power BI Known Issues page...

The end of April has brought new automation tools to Excel Desktop – sort of.

Power Query Refresh is now Generally Available in Excel for the web for queries sourcing data from the current workbook and anonymous OData feeds. Slowly but surely, the full Power Query capabilities are coming to the online variant of Excel!

When Power Query was first released in Excel for Mac, there was hope that it wouldn’t take long for the features to mirror their Window counterparts. It’s taking time, but the capabilities are improving.

Microsoft has recently upped its game with blocking macros. They argue that macro-based malware is on the rise and thus they are blocking macros from more and more external / third party locations. Protected mode seems insufficient.