It seems like they don't want to change anything that affects existing behavior, so they're mostly adding new features that are orthogonal to existing features.
Unfortunately this means that they're not really fixing most of the annoyances that were already present.
"Excel Labs" appears to just be an add-on using the normal API which is a lot easier than making change to Excel itself.
They've also added stuff like new functions for formulas and a new type of comments that are more like word comments (while renaming the old comments to "note") but it's pretty clear that they have chosen to focus on things that they can tack on without having to change existing functionality (presumably either so they won't break anything and/or because it's simpler easier to add this kind of stuff rather than getting too deep into the existing codebase)
I mostly agree with you. But I assume dynamic-array formulas (released in 2018) required deep calculation-engine changes. (For me, this feature is a game-changer.)
Comments
It seems like they don't want to change anything that affects existing behavior, so they're mostly adding new features that are orthogonal to existing features.
Unfortunately this means that they're not really fixing most of the annoyances that were already present.
"Excel Labs" appears to just be an add-on using the normal API which is a lot easier than making change to Excel itself.
They've also added stuff like new functions for formulas and a new type of comments that are more like word comments (while renaming the old comments to "note") but it's pretty clear that they have chosen to focus on things that they can tack on without having to change existing functionality (presumably either so they won't break anything and/or because it's simpler easier to add this kind of stuff rather than getting too deep into the existing codebase)
I mostly agree with you. But I assume dynamic-array formulas (released in 2018) required deep calculation-engine changes. (For me, this feature is a game-changer.)