After 40 years, Excel is breaking one of its oldest rules: one cell, one value
Software Microsoft microsoft office excel After 40 years, Excel is breaking one of its oldest rules: one cell, one value Excel Beta adds lists, arrays, and nested arrays inside a single cell By Skye Jacobs September 28, 2026, 6:15 Add TechSpot Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. First look: Microsoft is testing a version of Excel that allows users to put more than one value inside a cell, a break from the spreadsheet program's longstanding one-cell, one-value model.
- ▪Software Microsoft microsoft office excel After 40 years, Excel is breaking one of its oldest rules: one cell, one value Excel Beta adds lists, arrays, and nested arrays inside a single cell By Skye Jacobs September 28, 2026, 6:15 Add TechS
- ▪TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust.
- ▪First look: Microsoft is testing a version of Excel that allows users to put more than one value inside a cell, a break from the spreadsheet program's longstanding one-cell, one-value model.
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| Original publisher | TechSpot |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techspot.com/news/114005-after-40-years-excel-breaking-one-oldest-rules.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:15 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-28T11:21:07.333Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-28T11:21:07.333Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | BIeDbT7mRW_u · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Software Microsoft microsoft office excel After 40 years, Excel is breaking one of its oldest rules: one cell, one value Excel Beta adds lists, arrays, and nested arrays inside a single cell By Skye Jacobs September 28, 2026, 6:15 Add TechSpot Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. First look: Microsoft is testing a version of Excel that allows users to put more than one value inside a cell, a break from the spreadsheet program's longstanding one-cell, one-value model. The new capability includes lists, arrays in cells and nested arrays. It is available on an opt-in basis to Microsoft 365 Insiders in the Excel Beta Channel for Windows and Mac. Lists are the most straightforward part of the rollout.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechSpot.
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