It could allow Microsoft to threaten to use trademark law against competitors who support the Excel file format.
It would also mean Microsoft would need to provide indefinite support for a function name that might not survive more than a few marketing cycles.
You're talking about a product which still to this day thinks it's an excellent idea to have formulas be translated, with no support for the English version in other languages. I switch my Excel to Norwegian and I have to use SUMMER not SUM, and opening any sheet with SUM will just fail to compute.
So yes, it's a terrible idea, but it's also an entirely normal Excel thing to do.
At work we have a lot of Excel sheets being sent from customers that are basically data dumps from databases. People export to CSV, open it in Excel (not import), and tada, very convenient. Except now those numerical article numbers are missing all the leading zeros, half the weights are dates and so on...
It sure is one enticing hammer...
Excel spreadsheets might end up having errors from people (mis)using =COPILOT formulas, but this will never be a problem in other office suites. Hosting your project on GitHub might attract stupid pull requests from clueless people (mis)using the easy Copilot pull request functionality, but this will never be a problem on other forges.
Maybe the market will respond to this long-term?
4ndrewl•5mo ago
And I'd do that by writing out the function in Excel? :)