is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft Excel used to only allow two types of data: text and numbers.

Microsoft has updated Excel to allow developers to programmatically create their own custom data types in the popular spreadsheet program. This update isn't aimed at Excel-using business execs but ...

Microsoft on Thursday leaned more heavily into its support for “data types” within Excel, going beyond the staid concept of numbers and formulas to embrace a huge variety of elements that could reside ...