Microsoft is bringing custom data types to Excel. Businesses and consumers will be able to import structured data into a single cell and reference it throughout a spreadsheet.

You can convert text in Excel to linked data types. This is referred to as “linked” data types because the data is connected to an online data source.

Microsoft on Thursday announced some Excel and Power BI enhancements that add 'connected data types' on top of the standard strings and numbers options.

The first two of these data types, stocks and geography, will allow Excel to recognize automatically recognize a place or stock and serve up a rich set of data for it.

Soon, Excel will also let you bring in your own data types. That means you can have a “customer” data type, for example, that can bring in rich customer data from a third-party service into Excel.

Beyond just crunching budgets, Microsoft's recent Excel overhaul will give it the intelligence to recognize over 100 new data categories and process information in ways that were previously ...

If Stock Data Types is not showing or missing in Excel, repairing Microsoft 365, or updating or reinstalling Office. Learn more.

Excel can throw up various Data type Refresh errors. This post explains each and shows how to fix COULDN'T REFRESH DATA TYPES errors.