Microsoft Excel's new Stale Value Formatting now alerts users when a value is no longer reliable

Microsoft recently announced the release of a new feature in Excel for Windows called Stale Value Formatting. This feature is designed to help users know when a value in a cell is out of date and needs to be recalculated.

When a formula in Excel depends on a value in a cell and that value changes, the formula will automatically recalculate. However, Excel has a “Manual Calculation” feature that only recalculates when you tell it to. This can be useful if your spreadsheet is very complex and you want to avoid performance issues. The problem is that if you forget to recalculate, the cell values in your spreadsheet might be wrong.

Before this update, knowing when a cell value was stale was difficult. When a spreadsheet opens in Manual or Partial Calculation mode, Excel shows a warning icon next to a stale value and puts a strikethrough on the cell contents to tell you the value is no longer reliable. You can then recalculate right from the cell.

This feature is available to Excel M365 for Windows users running Version 2409 (Build 18025.20126) or later.

Microsoft says it’s rolling out Stale Value Formatting gradually to Excel to avoid any issues; if you don’t have it yet, you should soon. If you don’t want it, well, too bad, Excel doesn’t give you a choice. Excel’s new stale value formatting is available in Manual and Partial Calculation modes for rows, columns, and grids of cells. But it’s not yet available for tables, pivot tables, or charts.

In other news, the Redmond-based tech giant recently came under scrutiny when it was revealed that it might use Excel and Word documents from users to train its AI models.