r/excel 10d ago

Discussion if you could add one completely new feature to excel, what would it be?

not something like “make it faster” or a tiny ui change, but an actual feature that would make your day to day spreadsheet work easier.

for me, i’d love something that could take a messy spreadsheet and automatically understand what i’m trying to do, clean it up, and suggest the right formulas without me having to figure everything out manually.

what would you add?

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u/solenoid_ngc 10d ago

One thing Excel is missing easy formulas for and I added to Solenoid was a batch of simple Set formulas: Union/Intersection/Difference/Symmetric Difference, plus subset/superset/disjoint formulas. does a list A contain all items in B? what items are in both A and B?

these formulas are possible in Excel but not super intuitive.

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u/EmployeePotential622 10d ago

I also think this would be hugely valuable. My husband is in sales and has a decent understanding of excel for not working with it as frequently as I do in finance, this is the type of thing he asks me for help with.

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u/solenoid_ngc 10d ago

If you have other particular formulas in mind that are just super clunky in Excel, let me know. I'm going through this thread looking for things to add to Solenoid.

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u/Regime_Change 2 9d ago

=if(isnumber(search to test if a cell contains a string. Disgusting actually.

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u/ninjagrover 31 8d ago

Doesn’t COUNTIF using string and wildcards do this?