Microsoft cells out, crams multiple values into Excel boxes

Microsoft has ended 40 years of single-occupancy for Excel cells and is now allowing multiple values to inhabit the same home. "One of the oldest rules of spreadsheets: one cell, one value," said Jake Armstrong, senior product manager for Excel, in a LinkedIn post. "No longer!" "I’m excited to announce a set of new features: …

[Paul Crawford]

As if spreadsheets were not already a shit-show of data and logic validation, let us add another layer of crap to the shit sandwich...

[Tejodo]

Just the headline alone immediately made me think of this: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-dropkick-you-if-you-use-that-spreadsheet/

The idea that you can start nesting values? I know where this will end. Have you read House of Leaves?

[Jonathan Richards 1]

Excellent link

Thank you, that was a good read. Perhaps my favourite bit of dialogue:

Petitioner: This Is Unreasonable

Gatekeeper: Do I seem like a reasonable person?

[JoeCool]

oh no.

I skipped reading this article at first.

But clicked it on an idle Saturday morning.

Then I read the comments, and followed your link.

And Now I must find a Longsword.

[martinusher]

I've been a programmer for years -- decades -- and the one thing I fear even more than whatever Microsoft is coming up with this week is a clever programmer. I will confess to being one once back when I was young and ignorant but after trying to pick apart my incredibly ingenious and totally incomprehensible output a couple of times I learned the error of my ways. (The programs worked, BTW -- how they worked, who knows?)(For a given value of 'worked', of course.)

Spreadsheets are like BASIC (or Javascript, for that matter). A really useful tool that's incredibly easy to abuse. In the hands of the ingenious its a disaster waiting to happen. Over the years I've learned to like 'simple', even at the risk of being labeled 'stupid'. I don't mind designs being incredibly ingenious/clever/whatever (provided they're adequately documented) but I like implementation to verge on the moronic, using as few 'new, exciting features' as possible.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Prison Overcrowding

Coming to an Office cubicle near you

[Clausewitz4.1]

Standards

To change an industry standard after decades in use?

Terrible, terrible idea

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Standards

You don't like Tensors ?

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Standards

Wasn't that a film about giant worms?

[Snowy]

Re: Standards

I think you are on shaky ground with that one.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Standards

If you know what a tensor is, you would never use a spreadsheet to manipulate them.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Standards

You can manipulate anything with a spreadsheet - if you're foolish brave enough

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Standards

I wonder whether it would be easier to record within a cell, each change made to that cell, the person who did it, and the date and time... or simply do a sequence of git commits after each change?

[that one in the corner]

Re: Standards

Whenever I was asked why I'd write and compile some code for a "simple calculation", instead of "doing it the easy way and using a spreadsheet", I'd respond by pulling up the version control history of something similar, but old, and simply point at the checkin comments that describe how it'd been broken, and then fixed, and who was responsible for each.

Well, that plus the fact that spreadsheets confuse the hell out of me: this one time I tried, really hard, for a personal bit of shopping, to use Excel to calculate which purchasing options would get me the best bang for the buck, including P&P for multiple orders from suppliers. I gave up. Even when it gave a result, how the blazes could I show it was the correct one? Then, without fuss, coded a really shitty bit of C++ to brute force it and spent my money efficiently*.

* but not necessarily wisely: it is entirely possible to have *too* many different brands of fun toys in the box.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Standards

You don't like Tensors ?

Tensor, said the Tensor...

[NetMage]

Re: Standards

Excel’s change to an array based engine was a huge change and yet a vast improvement as well No reason this couldn’t be the same.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Standards

And this is going to conflict directly with the "dynamic array engine", as it'll be sensible (?) now to keep the results as an array in one cell. What fun you'll have.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Standards

Trying to bork compatibility with LibreOffice perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Standards

Screw Libre Office and its half-assed implementation, this borks compatibility with Excel.

That's a cardinal sin for Office Productivity apps.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Standards

Fair comment!

(although i'd argue that LibreOffice's implementation is hardly 'half-assed', it's more of a Sisyphean struggle as MS Borkzilla continually borks everything!)

[david 12]

Who asked for this feature.

It brings back bad memories of the extension of MS Access to include multiple-value cells -- part of the unwanted-feature-bloat that made MS Access slower, more flakey and less functional.

"Read developers use c, (RUST, c#, JAVA,FORTRAN), Excel is just pretty colours"

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Surprise!

Up to now, when I needed more then two dimensions (and I am not talking about sheets as "3rd"), OR more than one property for each "value" I had to use Powershell.

Other would some something else, nearly all languages today either are or can be used in object-oriented mode, i.e. more than one property.

That they use XML as storage is logical. Apart from the fact that .XLSX it is already mostly .XML inside this means that they "simply" extended the XML description a bit. Does not even need a new standard, ist is already possible in XML. Can be seen very easily if you Get-ChildItem | ConvertTo-Xml -As String or any other powershell object/table/whatever instead of getting your child's toys to XML them.

I actually like the idea, but I fear the implementation.

[Jonathan Richards 1]

Re: Surprise! - Fear the implementation

You are intrigued by the idea, and wish to subscribe to the newsletter. I get it. I believe you need an Imagination Upgrade to see how horrible this is. Data structures are essential to any sensible data processing, and building arrays for your data inside the cells of a gnarly old spreadsheet, saving it to a mutated XML monster and then parsing it with Powershell does not seem to me to be sensible, maintainable, teachable, or compliant with international human rights legislation.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Surprise! - Fear the implementation

Looks like you are among those who don't read until "I fear the implementation", hm? Jumping to conclusions, inability to read, and I mean actually read, and building a personal nightmare is getting more a thing I say...

[nobody who matters]

Re: Surprise! - Fear the implementation

Looking around at the ways in which a great many aspects of the World have changed over my 60+ years on it, I am inclined to feel that real life has all too frequently turned out to be worse than the "personal nightmare".

Fear of future changes is, for many people, based on past experiences.

Plus, we are talking about Microsoft here. Based on their track record in recent times, even if this really were a good idea, I think there is every justification for fearing the results of their implementation of it.

[the Kris]

Re: Surprise! - Fear the implementation

"inability to read" seems to apply to you.

You made it clear that you like the concept but fear the implementation. Jonathan argued against the concept.

[oldandgrey]

Same as it ever was

The auditability of spreadsheets is a disaster already, but Microsoft finds a way to make it worse.

I have a strong suspicion that the motivation for this 'enhancement' is boosting the traditional Microsoft Upgrade Treadmill.

People will receive a spreadsheet that they can't read because it uses the new feature. They can ask the sender for a compatible version of the file, or they can pay Microsoft for a software upgrade. The latter is often the path of least friction, as Microsoft knows very well.

[simonlb]

Re: Same as it ever was

And this is just going to be great when someone a complete fucking idiot in a government department 'discovers' the new features and a starts using it to create the forms they send out for you to fill in, leaving you with no option but to take out an O365 subscription to fill in those forms.

Nobody ever asked for this but trust me, idiots will find a way to justify using it purely because the feature is there.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Same as it ever was

> leaving you with no option but to take out an O365 subscription to fill in those forms

There is a place waiting in Hell for people like that.

in any case I will demand a paper based form if that ever happens - not everyone has a computer !

[Eric 9001]

Re: Same as it ever was

You do have other options - you can tell them that they need to have a standards-compliant way, for it to be possible to send the information.

Send them the invoice for the office 365 subscription and a WC if they insist (usually an immoral act, but in this case, it's not like they're going to pay, so that's fine) and tell them you're happy to fill out the forms - they'll just need to cover the requirements and they'll give you another way to fill the forms.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Same as it ever was

You do have other options - you can tell them that they need to have a standards-compliant way, for it to be possible to send the information.

Some of the stuff I currently have to fill in comes as an ODT file. Which, predictably, means that MS Excel produces a "some data may be lost if you save in this format" scary warning..

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Same as it ever was

They can ask the sender for a compatible version of the file, or they can pay Microsoft for a software upgrade

Used to see this in the Mac/Creative Cloud/Adobe Suite world. Pre-CC, Adobe would regularly release 'enhancements' that made the resultant files incompatible with older versions (you would get an error that said "opening this requires a version of Photoshop later than 6.1" or similar. Often, those enhancements were things that you *could* do with the older versions but just repackaged in a different way.

So one of our staff would get stuff through from a design bureau [1], try and open it and get the error. Which meant we had to upgrade *all* our licences to the latest version (because our staff worked on projects together and needed to be able to open any of the files in the various libraries).

Of course, Adobe then stopped that upgrade treadmill by coming out with Creative Cloud. Replacing all the labour of keeping up with the Joneses with one simple monthly payment! [2].

Scum is the mildest word that I can think of for them and all the other vendors who have switched over to subscription schemes for no reason other than to keep the Line Going Up.

[1] Who, we were convinced, were paid by Adobe to always use the latest versions, just so whatever they produced for customers would require said customer to upgrade to the latest.

[2] Which, of course, isn't simple as there are many, many options. And the ability for the vendor to hide costs & upgrade the price at will..

[Anonymous Coward]

For Codd's Sake, NO!!

Scenario:

Average Office Drone A creates a fresh spreadsheet, in order to misuse it as a database. It will hold employee contact info. The columns are allocated thusly:

LNAME, FNAME, EMPNO, OFFICENO, OFCPHONE, HMPHONE, ADDRESS, CITY, COUNTY, POSTCODE

ADDRESS is a multivalued field, and Drone A populates it accordingly.

Drone B (less computer-knowlegable), not understanding multivalues, inserts column ADDRESS2, and populates it.

Drone C prints labels from this spreadsheet, and complains, "Address labels are printing wrong for some people!"

Drone A sees the additional column ADDRESS2, and deletes it, knowing that column and its data are redundant.

Drone B opens the sheet, sees the ADDRESS2 column is gone, and complains, "My data is missing!!" Help Desk restores previous version via Volume Shadow Copy.

Drone D opens the sheet, modifies the value in ADDRESS2 for a couple people; the second multivalue in ADDRESS is unchanged for those people, who now have conflicting data in "their" spreadsheet row ...

In addition, brilliant employees lacking wisdom, or simple give-a-fucks, will use this feature to create ever-more-complex spreadsheet monuments to their perceived awesomeness, said monuments becoming a critical part of the business ...

Excel lock-in achieved!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Zzzz

how about structs, classes enums, vectors as datatypes..

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Zzzz

Next we'll have cells that contain Excel spreadsheets...

[PRR]

Re: Zzzz

> cells that contain Excel spreadsheets...

"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs ...."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonaptera_(poem)

[MOH]

Re: Zzzz

... upon their backs that bite 'em /

This standard stuff is working well /

Let's go and make it shite then

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Zzzz

Next we'll have cells that contain Excel spreadsheets...

Will it improve the Doom "experience" on Excel?

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Zzzz

I think we are reaching Quake level, here.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Yo dawg!

We heard you like spreadsheets. So we put a spreadsheet in your spreadsheet.

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Yo dawg!

Spreadsheetception?

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Yo dawg!

Spreadsheetception?

Spreadsheetageddon.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: cells that contain Excel spreadsheets

> Next we'll have cells that contain Excel spreadsheets...

Including the spreadsheet containing the cell that contains that spreadsheet…

Ouroborus, of the art of disappearing up your own arse.

I never liked spreadsheets from the get-go Visicalc, Lotus etc - more spreadshit than spreadsheet.

The people that use them, don't understand them; those that do understand them, don't use them.

I might have suspected that MS wants to store LLM weights and token vectors in Excel cells to run AI models within the spreadsheet but I really don't think MS is that "clever."

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Zzzz

"Next we'll have cells that contain Excel spreadsheets..."

Everyone arrives for work next morning and wonders where the company went. It disappeared into the infinitely recursive spreadheet cell.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Zzzz

No, Excel Cells which contain Access Databases (plural!) which create an automatic word form using VBS and uses Sharepoint as background storage.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: Zzzz

The Yellow Submarine vacuum monster comes to mind.

[david 12]

Re: Zzzz

Next we'll have cells that contain Excel spreadsheets...

It's called OLE. Object Linking and Embedding

[oldandgrey]

The blessings of Object Linking and Embedding

A colleague complaining to tech support about OLE errors: "If Microsoft allows me to drag and drop this file into this spreadsheet-cell, then it's meant to work, and if it doesn't work you are not doing your job properly."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Zzzz

Rather than Excel that'd be Incel.

Which is ironic as this is Excel users being involuntarily fucked.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Zzzz

Does this not describe Lotus Symphony (the 1-2-3 follow on in the '90s rather than the office suite).

IIRC that allowed each cell to be another type of object, including other spreadsheets.

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: Zzzz

And autorun macros ! We miss that as well

[AVR]

I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

I suspect the lack of compatibility is the point, to make third party software less compatible and thereby squeeze them out a bit more. MS has form there with standards whether formal or de facto.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

My first thought ... OK, second thought which joins the consensus of others as to the "wisdom" of this change ... was along the lines of "so that'll need the ISO standard updating then ?" Or pehaps, they never gave a flying f**k about actually complying with their own standard.

[cbri]

Not new

Google Sheets does this already partially; dropdown selection in Sheets allows multiple selections. It’s useful, and I think this is a nice addition to Excel.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Not new

Oh here we go then. Google adds a feature that MS doesn’t have. Despite the fact that MS have a zillion mostly unloved additional features over the comparable Google app, MS product manager screams at dev team to implement said feature, however badly, just to satisfy the ‘we do this too’ urge. This is what brought us collaboration via OneDrive (doesn’t work consistently), OneDrive itself (oh $deity) and beeping MS361.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: Not new

collaboration via OneDrive (doesn’t work consistently)

This. A thousand malformed Word (and Excel) files.

"But I don't see that!"

[Shares screen]

"Oh."

[Denarius]

reminds me of something ancient

back in the last millennium, an Oz gov department known for its rationality went for some weird multidimensional spreadsheet along with Lotus Bloats.Sounds similar. Hard to use, what problem was concept solving for average clerk ? Ironically as part of an LDAP access rights audit I wrote ksh93 script that was multidimensional to allow interrogation of any data "line". Have an impression it became similar to Adabas approach. Indexes as data. Worked well but classic non-maintainable code despite doing nothing unusual because most users dont think in more than 2 dimensions. Heck, most drivers struggle in one.

Sounds like another way to deteriorate the one piece of software M$ did well IMHO. Unless one is into eigen vectors etc, another hostile upgrade to ensure upgrade cycle continues. Bring back Lotus123 on DOS, or unix. There were unix clones, cant remember names

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: reminds me of something ancient

Bring back Lotus123 on DOS, or unix.

Yes !

Was my absolute favourite back in the day.

If it is installable (*.deb) on Linux, I am all in.

.

[oldandgrey]

Re: reminds me of something ancient

Try 'sc', a text-based spreadsheet with VI-like keybindings. It comes close to the old DOS versions of Lotus 1-2-3.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/sc

Have fun!

[MOH]

It's almost as if someone in manglement has never heard of pivot tables.

But the important thing is that his bonus is safe this year

[xyz123]

Microsoft: we forgot to break Excel when we broke Outlook search, Word and Powerpoint.

Here ya go!

[xyz123]

Microsoft: OOPS! we started putting your name, mothers maiden name, your bank details and sexual preferences into hidden array cells!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would fire any of my data scientists who used Excel for anything like this. Or anything much really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who exactly asked for this POS?

cue sagebrush blowing down Redmond Main St

IMHO, this is just MS trying to be relevant and then charge users triple the monthly subscription for the honour of being able to use something the didn't ask for or want... Oh wait this is just like Co-Pilot and other crapware than MS had forced down users noses in recent tears. FAIL.

[JimmyPage]

So they have added a dimension

Pretty certain this has been tried before

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So they have added a dimension

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.

[Denarius]

Re: So they have added a dimension

Twilight Zone ? Appropriate. Certainly no twilight of the gods. Not even Roman in the Glomin. T/H to Asterrix. How about twilight of the marketeers ? Please, M$, Google, just die soon

[that one in the corner]

Re: So they have added a dimension

It is from Microsoft, so

One of the Dungeon Dimensions.

What say you, Rincewind? Rincewind? Where did he get to? Ah. Hmm, impressive, the hat stays on.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: So they have added a dimension

There are still some string theorists who have not given up. Eleven dimensions. Eleven man!

But well, in math and programming you can have as many dimensions as you want, especially if your don't care whether it is useful.

[sedregj]

A1:A1000 "I must not jump the shark"

FFS a spreadsheet can be a powerful tool and jolly useful.

I ran up a finite capacity model for a factory (bakery - pies and that) in Excel back in the late '90s, with a sales forecast to bill of materials, prep, make, bake and wrap, dispatch and delivery to depot, with stores along the way. It took some discipline - for example all tables had a red coloured row with white text and the content precisely: "End" at the bottom and the macro code looked for it or bailed, so any screwed up inserts would fail a run. I had lots of checks for mad numbers in the forecast and dispatch compared to actual order etc.

Putting lists in a cell is stupid. It breaks the spreadsheet "state at a glance" model. How on earth do you you print it? How on earth would you reference a value in a list in a cell - OK not beyond the whit of humanity but why put a list within a cell within a table? Why not allow that list to inhabit a column of cells in a table?

I used to teach spreadsheets in the slightly earlier than late nineties and I feel betrayed by this wankery. This sort of nonsense was dreamed up by someone who does not understand what a spreadsheet really is or how to use it effectively.

The tabular format is a useful one for muggles and has worked for a good fifty years, despite the giggles from IT (I am from IT too). Now some tosser wants to turn Excel cells into fully statically typed objects with way too rich types.

Basically, they want to turn Excel into something else and its wrong, very wrong.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: A1:A1000 "I must not jump the shark"

> How on earth do you you print it?

The spice melange. The spice expands consciousness… gives the ability to fold cells… that is, print any part of the excel cell without error.

[PhilippeD]

And the next version?

They start with lists in a cell, then, for the next version they will add lists of tuples, then, why not, lists of spreadsheets ;-) Good luck for debugging/auditing.

Excel already allows people create labyrinthine systems, let’s help them increase the complexity!

[anonymous boring coward]

Well, this will end well…

[Dolvaran]

My immediate thought was, 'is this preparation for quantum computing? it may be wrong, it may be right... and all that

[A Non e-mouse]

Pick, and its successors, implemented a multi-valued database. Many people thought it was great as you didn't have to deal with pesky JOINs all the time. Until they wanted to port their apps and suddenly had extra work to do to normalise the data so it could be fed into a standard SQL database.

I see the same issue here: It's a "clever" solution, but it'll break so much that few people will use it so it'll wither and die.

[John F Jennings]

Lets be honnest

Excel is currently running almost every company. (certainly any I have been actually working in - from 10 employees to 20K).

It provides a glue between systems to provide middle managers with information and presentation upwards - no matter what other 'enterprise' solutions they use (or extract from for their excels).

Often in IT, we have to fix that for them.

More often, they have used copy/paste from the internet for formulae without understanding what they really do. Now they use copilot or claude (or whatever) to make code they understand even less - and we have even more difficult debugging to do.

Claude and Copilot will integrate these stupid ideas even deeper in the corporate glue - and we simply wont be able to support as its not 'natural' for most of us.

Changing excel will not only confuse these managers, they will mis-use the functions - for years.

If they really wanted to mess with excel - then fine - but call it a different thing and keep the old one. It was traumatic enough going from XLS to XLSX.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's break everything

We use an ERM system running on a little known backend called Progress (no, not Postgres). Progress is a very non-standard implementation of SQL. One of the things it does that is non-standard is array fields. These are fields which can hold multiple bits of data. They are stored as varchar fields with each of the multiple entries separated by semi-colons.

Because these fields aren't SQL standard, if I try to connect to the Progress database through the very poorly implemented ODBC drivers with Excel, MySQL, MSSQL or Access (used for quick prototyping), I can't pull data across from any array fields.

I imagine it will be a similar thing with these multi data cells.

[phy445]

Had to check my calendar

If I were tasked writing an April Fool story for Micro$soft then I'm pretty sure I could have come up with something more convincing!

[Paddy]

Jupyter hits hard!

...And Jupyter is open source.

jupyter.org

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Treesheets

A bit late, but from another forum, this case golem.de, about the same MS "Idea" : Treesheets

Or Ragtime 4.0 from 1996

[Eric 9001]

Well that's another way to add incompatability

To ensure that spreadsheets are broken in LibreOffice (until a version with support for the extension is installed).

It also will break compatibility with every last old version of Excel (but is that any different to every single new Excel release?), but your time is a sacrifice m$ is always willing to make.

[BartyFartsLast]

"Make it Shitty"

I've read the MS press release and it had a Norwegian accent.