What’s New in Excel For 2025

The bigger your workbook is and the more sheets it has, the more helpful it is to be able to navigate quickly.  The Navigation Pane lets you use a right-side pane to search for and navigate to sheets, ranges, tables, charts, and shapes in one spot.  Toggle it by going to the View ribbon tab and click the Navigation button.  Or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-w-k.

If navigation is important to you, check out a couple of custom Excel tools I use frequently: the Sheet Action Picker lets you shortcut all kinds of sheet actions (jump to front, jump to back, and add table of contents are just a few) and the Global Search box lets you search for files, sheets, named ranges and more in one auto-complete search box!
 

It’s easy to get lost in a sea of cell values and lose track of your cursor.  Focus cell helps you see where you’re at.  It’s helpful for presenting Excel sheets live and also when just trying to navigate and ensure you’re editing the right cell or reading the right row/column.  Toggle it on and off by going to the View ribbon tab and click the Focus Cell button.  Or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-w-e-f.  You can change the color used from the default green if desired. One caveat of focus cell – it stops highlighting when you activate a different app/window.  That’s right, focus cell loses focus (kind of ironic, right?).  If that’s important to you, there are long-used workarounds for achieving similar functionality using conditional formatting and VBA events.  The Conditional Formatting Picker (custom tool) lets you toggle a row/column/cell tracker on and off with a shortcut, along with several other helpful conditional formatting options.  

With thousands of features and commands available throughout Excel, it may not be easy to find what you’re looking for.  For a long time, the help function in Excel wasn’t terribly useful.  In fact, many hard-core Excel users would pry off the F1 key to not accidentally launch the help menu, which took a few precious seconds! The help functionality has gotten a lot better, and it’s easier than ever to find what you’re looking for and launch commands by adding a search box to the top of the right-click menu.  Just press the right button on your mouse and search using the box at the top (click the up arrow to jump straight to it).  You can also press the menu key (usually to the right of your keyboard’s spacebar).  When you see the command you want to run, just arrow down and press the Enter key or click on it.  Hover over them to learn more!

You might ask yourself what the big deal is about checkboxes, but the truth is they can be extremely helpful.  They give you a visual representation of a TRUE/FALSE value.  They can be formatted and work well with conditional formatting for checklists and trackers of all kinds.  To insert a checkbox, go to the Insert ribbon tab and click the Checkbox button.  Or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-n-c-b.

To change the checked state of a checkbox, simply check one with your mouse or select one or more cells and click the spacebar to toggle them.
 

Images haven’t gotten a ton of love in Excel – it’s something you see more in PowerPoint and other apps.  But that changes dramatically with the ability to embed images directly within cells.  This works great for icons, logos, product images, avatars, and even QR codes! There are two ways to add images directly into cells.  First, you can go to the Insert ribbon tab, then click the Pictures button and click Place in Cell.  Then select the source (usually “This Device” for me).  Note that the image will resize automatically based on the size of the cell.  I recommend aligning it to the center for a clean look. The second way to add images is by using the IMAGE function and referencing a file path or a URL.  The best part about this approach is that you can use cell references to dynamically build the file path/URL so that it can change along with your inputs.  See this approach in action to dynamically build colored QR codes in the example below (and in the free downloadable workbook!).  

From an audit standpoint, the show changes pane is huge.  There are entire apps that exist because there hasn’t been an easy way to track and review changes to Excel files, but this changes all that.  You can see who made the change, when it was changed, and what was changed.

You can filter to specific sheets or ranges to narrow down the changes you’re evaluating.  To display the track changes pane, go to the Review ribbon tab and click the Show Changes button.  Or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-r-g.

 

If you’ve used a workbook for a while and watched it grow and evolve over time, you probably know that there are items that can bloat the file – hidden formats, unused named ranges, and complex formulas, just to name a few. The check performance pane is a great way to see where some of these items are so that you can choose whether to clean them up.  To show the check performance pane, go to the Review ribbon tab and click the Check Performance button.  Or use the keyboard shortcut Alt-r-k.  

When dynamic array functions (aka DAFs) hit the scene around 2020, Excel became infinitely more powerful.  The ability to spill results across multiple cells gives you so many more options with how to model out your data.  Cell references are a key part of any function, especially DAFs.

There is often a need to build cell references such that they can automatically grow or change with your data.  TRIMRANGE lets you do that.  By using TRIMRANGE, you can automatically remove blank cells from a reference before the first non-blank cell and/or after the last non blank cell in a row and/or column. This way you can give yourself plenty of room to go and not worry about updating cell references. And as a bonus, it optimizes the performance of calculations.

You can also use the dot operator as a shortcut within your cell reference. Add a dot before the colon to trim the beginning and/or a dot after the colon to trim the ending (more common). See the screenshot below for examples of both TRIMRANGE and the dot operator.
 

PivotTables are one of the most popular and useful tools within Excel for analyzing data and asking on-the-fly questions. But they have structural limitations and they aren’t terribly useful to reference as source data. There have long been workarounds for taking a formula-driven approach to displaying data like PivotTables, but now there are functions built right in with PIVOTBY and GROUPBY! PIVOTBY allows you to use pivot fields – data fields, row fields, column fields, and filter fields – to display your data with one function that spills across multiple cells. There are several options for displaying headers and totals. See an example below of the PIVOTBY function in action. GROUPBY is very similar except that you can only specify data fields, row fields, and filter fields – not column fields. That can often make it easier and quicker when you don’t need column fields.  

Regular expressions (also known as regex) are a powerful way to evaluate for patterns in a string of text, numbers, and symbols.  They can be extremely specific and complex, and are often used as a part of data validation checks.  The Excel team recently rolled out not one but three regex functions:

• REGEXTEST – this tests whether a pattern exists within a string of text
• REGEXTRACT – this extracts the matching pattern if it exists within a string of text
• REGEXREPLACE – this replaces the matching pattern if it exists within a string of text

Working with regex patterns can be quite tedious, which is why AI chatbots are so helpful.  Regex101 is also a great resource.  Here’s an example prompt you can use and tweak when you want to work with regular expressions: I'm evaluating data in Excel and I need to use a regular expression. Write me a pattern using the REGEXTEST function that checks to ensure valid email addresses are being entered.  Here's an example of a valid email address: jimbob@fivestarplumbers.com. As with anything you use AI for, make sure to stress-test the results.  Try a few items to ensure the pattern is working correctly!  

Python in Excel integrates the world’s most popular programming language, Python, directly into the spreadsheet grid, allowing users to leverage powerful analysis and visualization libraries using Python code inside one or more cells. Python is an accessible, high-level language widely used for data science, machine learning, and statistical analysis due to its clean syntax and vast ecosystem of specialized libraries like pandas and matplotlib. You can input Python code directly into the formula bar using the new PY() function, making advanced data manipulation and transformation much more straightforward. The Python code runs securely in the cloud, passing the results (like a filtered table, a calculated value, or a generated chart) back into the Excel grid. To begin using Python in your Excel worksheet, simply select the cell where you want your Python result to appear and type the formula “=PY(” into the formula bar. This action immediately switches the cell’s input mode to Python, often indicated by an icon or visual cue in the cell. Within the parentheses, you can then write your Python code, referencing other Excel cells, ranges, or named tables as arguments (such as M2:M61 in the screenshot below), or a defined table name. When you press Ctrl+Enter, Excel securely executes the Python code in the Microsoft Cloud, and the final output—whether a single value, an array of values (which will spill into adjacent cells), or a custom chart—is returned directly to your worksheet cell.