Forum Discussion
XLOOKUP - don't take the bait!
albuck125 Thank you for the heads up! I was about to ask this very question - What happens when you open a spreadsheet in Excel 2019 that was created with Excel 365 using XLOOKUP? - and then came across your post. I first did a general search but no search engine result gave me the answer.
You've answered my unasked question. Thanks.
IMHO, support articles directly mention that new functionality like XLOOKUP is available only for subscription model:
XLOOKUP function - Office Support (microsoft.com)
and
When do I get the newest features for Microsoft 365? - Office Support
- Yes, that is true, but I think the point albuck125 was making is the fact that the XLOOKUP function that you add to your spreadsheet, using Excel 365, will cause a problem when the spreadsheet is opened in Excel 2019. Microsoft fails to warn about that problem.
If you mean such kind of warning shall be within grid I'm not sure that will be a good idea. It will be very noisy grid. Not clear how deep such backward compatibility warnings shall be (starting from Excel 2007?) and how wide - shall we warn about entire dynamic array concept, what implicit intersection doesn't work any more silently, etc.
IMHO, support documentation which mentions all above shall be enough.
SergeiBaklan I get your point, and I am not going to dispute it. I still appreciated the post of albuck125 because I was wondering about the compatibility of the said function and he answered my unspoken question. It is not so much about criticism of Microsoft than a heads up to people who may be unaware of the issue. That said, having a function in Excel 365 that is incompatible with Excel 2019 and earlier versions - which I think many people are still using - does make it kind of unusable unless you are sure you are never going to share your spreadsheet.