Welcome to the May 2024 update. This month, filtering for comments is rolling out to Excel for the web, and the new regular expression (REGEX) functions are rolling out to Insider Beta for Excel for Windows & Mac.

Excel for Web:

Filtering for Comments #FIA

Excel for Windows & Mac:

New Regular Expression (REGEX) Functions (Insiders)

Excel for Web

#FIA

Filtering for Comments
You can now filter comments that are active, resolved, or ones that @mention you so that you can find the comments you’re looking for. Filtering to a certain set of comments will update which comment indicators you see on the worksheet so you can focus on which comments are important with the context of your work. This feature is already supported on Mac and is currently rolling out to Web users.

Excel for Windows & Mac

New Regular Expression (REGEX) Functions (Insiders)

Regular expressions, or “regex,” are sequences of characters that define search patterns, commonly used for string searching and text parsing. They are incredibly versatile and are often used to check if a string contains a certain pattern, extract substrings that match the pattern, or replace substrings that match the pattern. 

The new regex functions we are introducing are: 

REGEXTEST: Checks if any part of supplied text matches a regex pattern. 

REGEXEXTRACT: Extracts one or more parts of supplied text that match a regex pattern. 

REGEXREPLACE: Searches for a regex pattern within supplied text and replaces it with different text.

We’re excited that these new functions can help you parse text more easily. Read more here >

Pull names from text using REGEXEXTRACT

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Special thanks to our Excel MVPs David Benaim, Bill Jelen, and Alan Murray for their contribution to this month’s What’s New in Excel article. David publishes weekly YouTube videos and regular LinkedIn posts about the latest innovations in Excel and more. Bill is the founder and host of MrExcel.com and the author of several books about Excel. Alan is an Excel trainer, author and speaker, best known for his blog Computergaga.com and YouTube channel with the same name.

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