Your thoughts serializing arrays to manage state in excel (by way of inventory tracking)

This is an interesting discussion and I believe points to a limitation in Excel. What I would like to see is formulas being able to return more general 'Data Types' to cells including lambda definitions or array results so that data could be held in memory rather than output to the sheet. I've seen a few options over recent years that may be of relevance to this kind of scenario:

- The Python in Excel extension is taking steps in this direction by supporting dataframes within cells: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/python-in-excel-dataframes-a10495b2-8372-4f0f-9179-32771fe0dc04

- Add-in libraries that support 'object handles' (e.g. XLL+/XLW frameworks) which are of particular relevance with Real-Time Data where array sizes may be variable and for efficiency only dependent cells need be recalculated.

- Without any extensions, I think the suggested text serialisation approach is a decent workaround for smaller data sets e.g. using ARRAYTOTEXT / TEXTJOIN functions. Another possibility might be to store transactional data as records (#rows, #cols, {data}) via array shaping functions TOROW / WRAPROWS - which might overcome the 32k data restriction though tables could not then be utilised due to the need for data spilling.