With the fairly new cloud-delivery model, many subscribers of Office 2016 will have received news and updates of their selected products over the last couple of months. One that captured my immediate attention announced 6 new, quite useful functions in Excel 2016. They are:

• TEXTJOIN: joins text strings in a simpler way than the CONCATENATE-function; very useful for address or email lists;
• CONCAT: this replaces the old CONCATENATE function, and works in a similar fashion than its predecessor;
• IFS: this is a great new function, as it helps avoid the need for nested IF-statements that can become quite lenghty;
• SWITCH: provides a similar use to IFS, but works to a different logic. An expression is evaluated against a list of values, and specifies return values specific to each value;
• MAXIFS/MINIFS: the newest additions to the family of COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIFS, and SUMIFS functions; these work similar to MIN and MAX, but can be tied to conditions to be met.

This Office blog post here provides more detail on the new functions, as well as further links to the individual functions.

At the same time, this is a very good example how SaaS models can help update software on an ongoing basis without the need to roll out fully new versions. Of course, this requires a stronger attention by accountants to new developments in their area of expertise.