In a nutshell: Up until recently, Microsoft Excel users have only been able to enter text and numbers as data into cells. One of the announcements Microsoft made at its Ignite 2021 event this week is ...

is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft Excel used to only allow two types of data: text and numbers.

Microsoft on Thursday leaned more heavily into its support for “data types” within Excel, going beyond the staid concept of numbers and formulas to embrace a huge variety of elements that could reside ...