What I would like to see in Excel 2016

[Rick Rothstein]

Some off the top of my head things I would like to see added to XL2016 (would be nice if they could be extended to earlier versions as well).

1) Extend the CONCATENATE function to be able to handle ranges as well as single entries (similar to how I did it in this UDF...Flexible Concatenation Function or even this one... FORMATTED Flexible Concatenation Function). Oh, and change its name to something simpler to type, like maybe JOIN.

2). Add a FIELD function similar to this one... Get Field from Delimited Text String

3) Make the MID function's work like the VBA Mid function so that its third argument is optional (when omitted, it automatically pulls the remainder of the characters in the text).

4) After making a selection of contiguous or non-contiguous cells, give us a method to deselect individual cells from the selection.

5) Extend the VBA Precedents and Dependents properties so that they work across multiple worksheets instead of making us concoct some weird code using the NavigateArrow method coupled with worksheet activations.

6) Give VB a FindAll method so that we do not have to keep constructing multi-line loops in order to move between all cells matching the find's conditions.

I am sure there are tons more, but those come to mind quickly whenever I think about what is missing in Excel.

 

[Peter_SSs]

6) Give VB a FindAll method so that we do not have to keep constructing multi-line loops in order to move between all cells matching the find's conditions.

I'd strongly second that one!

 

[Robert Mika]

Some off the top of my head things I would like to see added to XL2016 (would be nice if they could be extended to earlier versions as well).

1) Extend the CONCATENATE function to be able to handle ranges as well as single entries (similar to how I did it in this UDF...Flexible Concatenation Function or even this one... FORMATTED Flexible Concatenation Function). Oh, and change its name to something simpler to type, like maybe JOIN.

3) Make the MID function's work like the VBA Mid function so that its third argument is optional (when omitted, it automatically pulls the remainder of the characters in the text).

Have they ever done enything like this?
Extend(improve) function functionality
Or rather create a new one.

A native MAXIF(s) woudl be handy as well
But then who woudl ask this question anymore...

 

[Rick Rothstein]

Have they ever done enything like this?
Extend(improve) function functionality
Or rather create a new one.

I do not have experience with early releases of Excel, but if I had to guess, I would say "Yes". There is no real good reason for FIND and SEARCH to both exist unless they were created at different times... SEARCH could easily be extended to encompass the functionality of FIND with the addition of one more argument. My guess is FIND was placed into Excel first, then later on when the additional functionality of SEARCH was deemed necessary, I think they introduced the new SEARCH function rather than modify the existing FIND function and risk breaking some kind of backward compatibility. Of course, this is only a guess on my part.

 

[xenou]

I like some of the previous ideas. I'll add:
regular expression searching
curve sketching for statistics, so that if you provide the mean and standard deviation (or degrees of freedom for t-distributions) excel will graph the curve for you.

 

[RoryA]

I'd like PowerPivot made available as a free add-in again (or built into all versions).

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

I'd like PowerPivot made available as a free add-in again (or built into all versions).

You mean backtrack and install in prior versions? Can they do that?

I HATE that one can't group date fields in PowerPivot pivot tables in the conventional manner!

 

[RoryA]

You mean backtrack and install in prior versions?

No, I mean make it available in, or to, versions of Office other than ProPlus - which is the restriction in 2013.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

No, I mean make it available in, or to, versions of Office other than ProPlus - which is the restriction in 2013.

Ah I didn't realise that it wasn't... Makes sense to be consistent!

 

[Scott Huish]

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