Microsoft Excel, a year in review: unlocking insights with Copilot and Python

Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! Last year, we released a variety of improvements and new capabilities to enhance the Microsoft Excel experience. With the start of 2025 – and as Excel approaches its fourth decade of helping people and businesses effectively organize, analyze, and visualize data – we wanted to look back on some of our most exciting achievements backed by insider feedback and encouragement.

Stronger and faster insights with Copilot and Python​

In 2024, we focused on making Excel even better at what it does best: providing insights on data for sharing and decision-making. With the integration of Copilot and Python, we’ve made iterating on data faster and more advanced, even for those who are not Python experts. Excel’s AI capabilities can perform routine tasks and reasoning, highlight important information, solve issues, execute formatting and formulas, and provide valuable analysis of data.

Learn more about leveraging Copilot and Python in Excel:

• Unlock the power of Copilot in Excel, now generally available
• Announcing Python in Excel: Combining the power of Python and the flexibility of Excel.
• See what’s possible with Copilot in Excel
• Copilot in Excel: Working with Columns & Formulas
• Copilot in Excel: Excel Chat Helper
  
  
  

More advanced functionality​

New regular expression functions and modes for XLOOKUP and XMATCH provide advanced text manipulation options and empower you to perform more complex searches and matches with ease. Additionally, improvements to LEN, MID, SEARCH, FIND, and REPLACE now support Unicode surrogates, further optimizing text handling. The ability to refresh data using Power Query’s From Folder connector in Excel for Mac has streamlined data updates, making it quicker to keep information current. Lastly, the introduction of two translation functions, TRANSLATE and DETECTLANGUAGE, makes working with and reformatting datasets in over 100 different languages a breeze.

Learn more about updates to Excel functions:

• New Regular expression (Regex) functions in Excel, and new regex modes for XLOOKUP and XMATCH
• Improving five Excel text functions: LEN, MID, SEARCH, FIND, and REPLACE + Compatibility Versions
• New Translation Functions in Excel: TRANSLATE and DETECTLANGUAGE
• Refresh data using Power Query’s From Folder connector in Excel for Mac
• Stale value formatting now available in Excel for Windows
  
  
  

Greater optionality for the web​

We’ve made key updates and added highly requested capabilities to Excel for the web in 2024. For example, you can now share links to Sheet views, which quickly brings focus to important information and allows users to gather targeted feedback, as well as export sheets to CSV to use Excel data between apps and across platforms. You can now also sync Microsoft Forms data directly to Excel for the web to keep information up-to-date in real time. A modernized grid functionality brings effortless resizing, quicker insertion, enhanced navigation, and easier cell highlighting, while an improved File menu and copying and pasting capabilities offer a more seamless and intuitive experience.

Learn more about the updated Excel for the web experience:

• Share links to Sheet views in Excel for the web
• Export to CSV in Excel for the web
• Sync Microsoft Forms data to Excel for the web
• Copying and pasting improvements in Excel for the web
• File menu improvements in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for the web
  
  
  

Updated accessibility and more​

We’re constantly offering more intuitive, secure, and accessible ways to interact with and get the most out of Excel. With KeyTips for Mac, you can take action even if you don’t have a keyboard, while updates to saving and creating PDFs of spreadsheets clean up burdensome errors and improve accessibility of data. You can now detect and address performance issues in Excel for Windows, a feature only previously available on the web, and more easily navigate rows and columns with Focus Cell. New home widgets and Handoff support put files on Apple devices also give you quicker and easier access to relevant documents, from anywhere and without unnecessary barriers. In an effort to support the use of Pen & Ink capabilities in Excel, we’ve made converting handwritten and drawn information into text and shapes as simple and accurate as possible.

Learn more about these features:

• Increase ease of navigation with Focus Cell in Excel
• KeyTips now available in Office for Mac
• Create accessible PDFs with Microsoft 365 apps
• Make your workbooks more performant with Check Performance in Excel for Windows
• Recent widgets for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Mac
• New Recent Files widgets for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iOS
• Seamlessly switch between your Apple devices with Handoff support for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Introducing dynamic watermarking for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Modernized experience for user-defined permissions in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Ink to Text Pen now available in Excel for Windows
• Create neat lines and shapes with ink in Excel and PowerPoint for Windows
  
  
  

Of course, we must also tip our hats to the most celebrated Excel blog in 2024, another important update to the Excel for the web experience that makes it more enjoyable and ensures you can get more tasks done in less time: Modernized grid functionality streamlines your tasks in Excel for the web.

Your feedback makes us better​

We hope that these improvements have inspired you to take advantage of new and improved capabilities and level-up your Excel experience. We value your ongoing support and insightful feedback as it inspires us to continually innovate and enhance our products as an essential tool for users around the globe. Every suggestion and comment you share plays a pivotal role in our journey towards excellence. Please keep them coming and help us make Excel the best product it can be for YOU using any of these methods!

Thank you for being a part of our amazing history, and for helping us craft the future of Excel.