Microsoft opens up Excel to customized knowledge varieties with photographs, arrays, and extra

Microsoft Excel used to solely permit two varieties of knowledge: textual content and numbers. After overhauling Excel with its personal reside customized knowledge varieties final 12 months, Microsoft is opening up Excel to provide builders the liberty to create their very own customized knowledge varieties that may comprise photographs, arrays, and extra.

A brand new JavaScript API shall be obtainable to preview inside Excel later this month, which can let builders create these customized knowledge varieties for inputs and outputs and allow customized capabilities. Excel builders will be capable of create their very own add-ins or replace present ones to make use of the JavaScript API.

This will open Excel as much as much more customized knowledge varieties, together with content material playing cards, photographs, matrices, arrays, and formatted quantity values. Excel has lengthy had help for macros and add-ins, however Microsoft’s new APIs ought to make this much more environment friendly and simpler for builders to implement.

“These more flexible structures give you the ability to organize complex data as objects and expose this data to users in more natural ways,” explains Wangui McKelvey, common supervisor of Microsoft 365. “You can share the power of data types across your entire organization and create add-ins or solutions which can connect data types to your own service or data.”

A preview of the brand new JavaScript API in Excel shall be obtainable later this month, nevertheless it’s not clear precisely when this shall be rolled out to all Microsoft 365 customers.