Stale value formatting now available in Excel for Windows

Hey, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Prash Shirolkar, a Product Manager on the Excel team. I’m excited to share with you an improvement to Partial and Manual Calculation mode in Excel for Windows: stale value formatting. With this change, Excel now informs you if a cell value is no longer reliable (stale) and should be recalculated.

Stale value formatting in Excel for Windows

A cell is considered stale when the underlying data for its formula changes, but the formula has not yet been recalculated. Before this update, you could not distinguish between stale and up-to-date cells in Partial and Manual Calculation modes in Excel.

Now, Excel flags a stale cell in these modes with a strikethrough, alerting you that its value is no longer reliable and should be recalculated to account for the recent change.

How it works

1. Open an existing Excel workbook in Manual Calculation mode that contains cell(s) with data that uses formulas.
2. Change the value for a cell (or range of cells) that another cell with a formula depends on; notice that when a cell with a stale value is selected, a warning icon appears.
3. Press F9 to recalculate, or click the icon that appears next to the cell and select the command you want in the dropdown menu.Strikethrough indicates cells that are stale (because the underlying formula data has changed) in Partial and Manual Calculation modes
4. Save and close the workbook. Open another in Partial Calculation mode that contains cell(s) with data that uses formulas.
5. Change the value for a cell (or range of cells) that another cell using a Python formula or a Data Table depends on.
6. When a warning icon appears next to a cell that contains stale data, press F9 to recalculate, or click the icon that appears next to the cell and select the command you want in the dropdown menu.

Availability

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

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Feedback

We’d love to hear from you! Let us know what you think of this improvement by selecting Help > Feedback. Be sure to include #StaleUX in your comments so we can easily find them.

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