AI is all about data, and the representation of the data matters strongly. But after focusing primarily on 8-bit integers and 32‑bit floating-point numbers, the industry is now looking at new formats.

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.

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.

Microsoft Excel used to only allow two types of data: text and numbers. After overhauling Excel with its own live custom data types last year, Microsoft is opening up Excel to give developers the ...