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albuck125's avatar
albuck125
Copper Contributor
Oct 13, 2020

XLOOKUP - don't take the bait!

If you are in Excel under Office 365 and try to get help using functions HLookup and VLookup, you'll be guided by Microsoft to use the new and improved "XLOOKUP", which according to MS replaces the o...
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MariusPretorius's avatar
MariusPretorius
Iron Contributor
Jan 07, 2021
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.
  • SergeiBaklan's avatar
    SergeiBaklan
    Diamond Contributor
    Jan 08, 2021

    MariusPretorius 

    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.

    • MariusPretorius's avatar
      MariusPretorius
      Iron Contributor
      Jan 09, 2021

      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.

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