New Functions in Excel For 2019

You would not expect much new in Excel after 30 years of development but you would be wrong if you think there is nothing highly useful and new in Excel for 2019.  I recently attended Microsoft Ignite 2018 in Florida which presented many new useful features and function for Office products in 2019 but Excel was a special case.  In addition to all the common functionality explained in THIS article, Excel has some new VERY useful functions you will want to know about.

These functions will be in both Office 2019 standalone version and in the Office 365 Pro Plus suite any week now.

There is one amazing new feature called Dynamic Arrays.   Dynamic Arrays allow formulas and functions to apply to a multi-column or multi-row list of data rather.  This is hard to explain in writing but easy to understand when you see the following video explaining the new UNIQUE ad FILTER functions:

Another new function you will likely need at some point is named RANDARRAY.  You will not be surprised to find that it produces an Random Array of numbers which is also demonstrated in the video above.

For more details, click these links to go directly to the Microsoft support page for each function:

• UNIQUE – Returns a list of unique values in a list or range – Syntax: =UNIQUE(array,[by_col],[occurs_once])
• FILTER – Filter a range of data based on criteria you define – Syntax: =FILTER(array,where,[if_empty])
• SEQUENCE – Outputs an ordered list – Syntax: =UNIQUE(array,[by_col], [occurs_once])
• RANDARRAY – Returns an array of random numbers between 0 and 1 – Syntax =RANDARRAY([rows],[columns])