Over the course of the last few years, Microsoft started adding the concept of "data types" to Excel; that is, the ability to pull in geography and real-time stock data from the cloud, for example.

is a senior editor and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft is overhauling Excel with the ability to support custom live data types.

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 ...