3 Excel updates you won't want to miss (and none of them involves Copilot)

Published Oct 13, 2026, 10:30 AM EDT Tony Phillips is an experienced Microsoft Office user with a dual-honors degree in Linguistics and Hispanic Studies. Prior to starting with How-to Geek in January 2024, he worked as a document producer, data manager, and content creator for over ten years, and loves making spreadsheets and documents in his spare time. Tony is also an academic proofreader, experienced in reading, editing, and formatting over 3 million words of personal statements, resumes, reference letters, research proposals, and dissertations. Before joining How-To Geek, Tony formatted and wrote documents for legal firms, including contracts, Wills, and Powers of Attorney. Tony is obsessed with Microsoft Office! He will find any reason to create a spreadsheet, exploring ways to add complex formulas and discover new ways to make data tick. He also takes pride in producing Word documents that look the part. He has worked as a data manager in a secondary school in the UK and has years of experience in the classroom with Microsoft PowerPoint. He loves to encounter problems in Microsoft Office and use his expertise and legal-level training to find solutions. Outside of the Microsoft world, Tony is a keen dog owner and lover, football fan, astrophotographer, gardener, and golfer. After decades of using Excel, you'd think I'd have run out of things to grumble about. Nope. There are still plenty of little frustrations I've learned to work around, which is why I'm always happy to see Microsoft smooth out the rough edges. Three recent updates have caught my eye, and refreshingly, Copilot has nothing to do with them. Microsoft is gradually rolling out these features as previews, so exactly how and when they appear in your version of Excel may vary. One of Excel's best formatting tricks is easier to find I've spent years telling you to stop merging cells If you've read my articles about merged cells, you'll know I'm not their biggest fan. They seem harmless enough when you're formatting a spreadsheet, but they can cause all sorts of headaches once you start working with the data. Sorting and filtering don't always play nicely with merged cells, converting a range containing them into a table automatically unmerges them, and data analysis tools can struggle with merged data. That's why I've long preferred Center Across Selection when I want a heading to appear across several cells. It gives you much the same visual result as merging—but the cells remain separate, and the text stays in the top-left cell. Excel can still treat the underlying range like a normal range of cells. The problem has always been finding the thing. Center Across Selection has traditionally been tucked away in Excel's Format Cells dialog, which is hardly convenient if you use it regularly. I've previously added it to my Quick Access Toolbar, but even that requires a fairly elaborate VBA workaround. In this update, Microsoft has made it much easier to access by adding Center Across Selection to the Merge and Center button's drop-down menu. This is a move in the right direction, but I'd still prefer Center Across Selection to have its own button rather than sharing a menu with Merge and Center. That said, this update should mean fewer people reach for Merge and Center simply because it's easier to find. This table feature matters more than you think Table names are getting the attention they deserve I've long advised Excel users to stop leaving tables with default names such as Table1, Table2, and Table3. Once you've worked with a few large workbooks, you'll understand why. Give a table a meaningful name, and your formulas become much easier to understand. Structured references tell you what data you're working with, rather than leaving you to remember what Table7 happens to contain. Meaningful table names also make navigation easier. I can open the Name Box drop-down list and select a table to jump straight to it, rather than scrolling through a sprawling workbook trying to find the right range. They also help me identify the correct data when working with Power Query, PivotTables, charts, and other Excel features. Until now, creating a table and naming it have been separate steps. You create the table, then go to the Table Design tab to give it a meaningful name. Microsoft is changing that. The Create Table dialog now lets you enter a name as part of the creation process. I like this because it's more than a mere interface tweak. It acknowledges something I've been arguing about for years: a table's name isn't an afterthought; it's an important property of the table itself. When I create a table, I already know what the data represents, so naming it at that point makes sense. This update could change how people organize their workbooks. And if you've ever inherited a spreadsheet full of generically named tables, you'll know why I'm pleased to see it. Excel is challenging the #1 rule of spreadsheet data One cell doesn't always have to be one data point anymore Credit: Microsoft One of the most basic principles I've followed when working with Excel is that one cell should contain one data point. If I have five pieces of information, I put them in five cells. I don't cram them into one cell separated by commas, line breaks, or some other delimiter. That's because Excel has always worked best when data is structured properly. Individual values can then be sorted, filtered, calculated, queried, summarized, and used by other features. Microsoft is now introducing something that challenges that principle: lists and arrays inside cells. Lists let you keep several individual items in one cell while still filtering by those items separately. For example, you could record which sports each person has signed up for in a single cell, then filter the list to find everyone who plays basketball, tennis, or another sport. Previously, you'd need separate columns for each sport or a comma-separated text string, which wouldn't give you individual sports as options in the column's filter menu. Arrays take this further: instead of a formula spilling its results across a range, you can keep the entire array in one cell and use its individual values in further calculations. Arrays can also contain other arrays, known as nested arrays. To help you work with this new structure, Microsoft is introducing four functions: =FLATTEN(): Removes one or more levels of nesting from an array. =HAS(): Checks whether an array contains a particular value, returning TRUE or FALSE. =HASANY(): Checks whether an array contains any of a specified set of values, returning TRUE or FALSE. =HASALL(): Checks whether an array contains every value in a specified set, returning TRUE or FALSE. This is brand-new territory for Excel, so this update feels very different from the first two. Center Across Selection is a better way to format a range. Naming tables is a better way to organize a workbook. Lists and arrays in cells could change how we think about spreadsheet data itself. There are some caveats. Most calculations involving nested arrays require Compatibility Version 3, a new workbook setting that my version of Excel doesn't yet support. Microsoft also lists several current limitations. For example, you can't use lists or arrays as data validation drop-down items, and Find & Replace can't change individual items inside them. PivotTables can't read array values as source data, while Power Query can't load or output columns containing arrays. I don't think this means my one-cell-one-data-point rule suddenly becomes bad advice. For conventional Excel datasets, keeping individual values in individual cells is the sensible approach, but Microsoft is giving us another option. Excel doesn't need AI to get better Copilot has taken up so much of the Excel spotlight over the past year that it's easy to wonder where the everyday improvements went. As useful as AI can be, it's frustrating when longstanding usability niggles remain untouched while the next Copilot feature gets the attention. That's why these three updates are so refreshing: they show that, at least for now, Microsoft hasn't abandoned the fundamentals.