Excel lets you use food, movies, space, and more data types

What type of data do you mostly handle or process in Excel day to day? Names of places, movies, food?

Well, from now on, you don’t have to assign generic types, such as, text or integers, to that kind of data.

Where relevant or applicable, you have the option to use any of the more than 100 new Excel data types that Microsoft launched to Office insiders on Windows 10 and Mac.

New Microsoft Excel data types

If you’re an Office insider with a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can start working with the new data types in Excel, including:

Food: calories, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, nutrients, etc.

Exercise: exercise types and calories burned.

Locations: zip codes, economic data, airports, schools, forests,etc.

Universities: graduation rates, tuition, student body, etc.

Chemistry: elements, compounds, and minerals.

Space: planets, moons, satellites, supernovas, space missions, etc.

Movies: actors, characters, directors, release dates, poster art,etc.

And More: music, plants, animal breeds, famous people, languages, etc.

Moreover, you can assign properties to your data types. For example, the food data type has properties like calories and nutrients.

You can reference data types with formulas besides creating your data types in Excel. Also, you can manipulate the data as you’d typically do in a table.

For example, you may filter or sort your data based on the new properties.

In addition, the feature comes with a couple of automations to let you quickly get started on crunching the numbers.

Creating a table for the Food data type is a perfect example. When you add a column to the right of the Food table, you’ll get auto-suggestions for a single field or multiple fields. Also, Excel will auto-fill the columns with their respective values.

The new Excel data types are yet another consumer-focused feature that Microsoft is bringing to the spreadsheet application. A few weeks ago, the company announced Money in Excel, a personal finance management tool aimed at individual consumers.

If you’re an Office insider, have you received the new Microsoft Excel data types yet? Kindly let us know in the comments section below.