Here are all the new features Microsoft added to Excel in October 2025

Earlier today, we learned that Anthropic has introduced a Claude-powered Excel add-in to amplify its presence in the fintech space. While that can attract customers to Excel, it is perhaps even more significant when Microsoft itself adds new features to its software in a bid to win more users and retains its existing ones. To that end, it has detailed all the new capabilities it introduced in its popular spreadsheet software during the month of October 2025.

This month was a bit on the slower side for Microsoft Excel, with only four new features added to the software in the past four weeks. Starting with Excel for the web, the Redmond tech giant has introduced an "early preview" of Agent Mode in Excel through the Frontier program for Microsoft 365 Copilot. For those unaware, "frontier" is a term that Microsoft coined to describe firms which are adopting AI-first approaches to scale their business. Agent Mode allows Copilot to take control of a task after you describing what to do in natural language - the feature is coming soon to desktop too.

Coming over to Excel for Windows and Mac, we have two features in tow. The #SPILL experience has been ported from dynamic arrays to PivotTables, which means that you'll see an error message if something is blocking your PivotTable from expanding. Secondly, Microsoft has also made significant improvements to Accessibility Assistant, we have discussed those in detail here. This has been tagged as "#FIA", also known as "Feedback in Action" to identify items heavily requested by the Excel community.

Finally, Excel for Windows received Formula by Example, which was previously available on the web only. Basically, Excel will automatically look for patterns in your existing data and will then suggest a formula to fill the rest of the associated cells.

As always, you can file feedback to Microsoft about Excel directly from within the application or through the dedicated feedback portal here.

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Posted Wednesday 29 October 2025 at 3:57 am AEST (my time).

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