What's New in Excel (August 2024)

Welcome to the August 2024 update. This month, use Copilot in Excel to create custom charts & PivotTables, as well as summarize textual data within your workbook. Also, the new regex modes for XLOOPUP and XMATCH are now rolling out to Beta users for Windows and Mac, allowing you to take advantage of regex within those existing functions.

Excel for Windows, Mac, and web:
- Copilot in Excel: Create custom charts & PivotTables

- Copilot in Excel: Text insights

- Dynamic watermarking (Insiders)

Excel for Windows and Mac:
- New regex modes for XLOOKUP and XMATCH (Insiders)

Excel for Windows:

- Filtering for comments #FIA

Excel for Windows, Mac, and web

 

Copilot in Excel: Create custom charts & PivotTables

Copilot can now create PivotCharts and PivotTables according to your specification. Tell Copilot what kind of chart you want and configure the axes, title, labels, and more. Or you can specify the configuration for a PivotTable that you would like to create.

Current chart types that are supported: line, pie, clustered bar, stacked bar, hundred percent stacked bar, clustered column, stacked column, hundred percent stacked column, donut, area, hundred percent stacked area, histograms, and scatter.

Create a custom PivotChart example:
Create custom charts using Copilot in Excel
Create a custom PivotTable example:
Create a custom PivotTable using Copilot in Excel

 

Copilot in Excel: Text insights
Summarize textual data like survey results, reviews, comments, and more with Copilot in Excel. Tone, length and content of the summary are all adjustable through your prompt. 
Get valuable insights from text using Copilot in Excel

 

Dynamic Watermarking (Insiders)
Sensitivity labels from Microsoft Purview Information Protection offer a highly effective way to limit access to sensitive files and prevent people from taking inappropriate actions with them, such as printing a document, while still allowing for full collaboration. Watermarking protects against screenshots and existing technology that may not provide this kind of security coverage. Read more here >
Dynamic watermarking in Excel

 

Excel for Windows and Mac

 

New regex modes for XLOOKUP and XMATCH (Insiders)

Now you can take advantage of regex within the existing XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions, by using the new [match_mode] = 3 and a regex pattern as the lookup_value. This will allow XLOOKUP and XMATCH to match against parts of text in a cell, or by any other pattern of text that can be described with regex. These functions are rolling out to Beta Channel users. Read more here >

New regex mode for XLOOKUP
Excel for Windows

#FIA

Filtering for Comments
You can now filter comments that are active, resolved, or ones that @mention you so that you can find the comments you're looking for. Filtering to a certain set of comments will update which comment indicators you see on the worksheet so you can focus on which comments are important with the context of your work. This feature is already supported on Mac and web and is currently rolling out to all Windows users.
Filter comments that are active, resolved, or ones that @mention

 

 

Check if a specific feature is in your version of Excel Click here to open in a new browser tab

 

Many of these features are the result of your feedback. THANK YOU! Your continued Feedback in Action (#FIA) helps improve Excel for everyone. Please let us know how you like a particular feature and what we can improve upon—"Give a compliment" or "Make a suggestion"..  You can also submit new ideas or vote for other ideas via Microsoft Feedback.

 

Subscribe to our Excel Blog and the Insiders Blog to get the latest updates. Stay connected with us and other Excel fans around the world – join our Excel Community and follow us on X, formerly Twitter.

 

Special thanks to our Excel MVPs David Benaim, Bill Jelen, and Alan Murray for their contribution to this month's What's New in Excel article. David publishes weekly YouTube videos and regular LinkedIn posts about the latest innovations in Excel and more. Bill is the founder and host of MrExcel.com and the author of several books about Excel. Alan is an Excel trainer, author and speaker, best known for his blog Computergaga.com and YouTube channel with the same name.