Microsoft is bringing custom data types to Excel. Businesses and consumers will be able to import structured data into a single cell and reference it throughout a spreadsheet.

Microsoft on Thursday announced some Excel and Power BI enhancements that add 'connected data types' on top of the standard strings and numbers options.

You can convert text in Excel to linked data types. This is referred to as “linked” data types because the data is connected to an online data source.

The first two of these data types, stocks and geography, will allow Excel to recognize automatically recognize a place or stock and serve up a rich set of data for it.

If Stock Data Types is not showing or missing in Excel, repairing Microsoft 365, or updating or reinstalling Office. Learn more.

Figure F Set column data types. Figure G Create the list file. Figure H You now have a list to work with in Microsoft Lists. As you can see in Figure H, Microsoft imports and formats the Excel data.

Excel can throw up various Data type Refresh errors. This post explains each and shows how to fix COULDN'T REFRESH DATA TYPES errors.

Displaying values on a map chart is more meaningful than handing someone a sheet of data. Thanks to Microsoft Excel's Geography data type, creating a map chart is easier than you might think.