Microsoft Removes Costly Feature from Windows and Mac Excel

Microsoft Removes Costly Feature from Windows and Mac Excel

Significant Updates in Microsoft 365 Admin Center

The Microsoft 365 (M365) Admin Center has recently unveiled notable changes concerning various applications and their support frameworks. Among these updates, the most significant is the extension of Windows 10 support for M365 applications until 2028, ensuring users can continue to leverage these tools effectively through that year.

Features on Hold

In addition to the extended support, Microsoft has decided to pause two key feature rollouts. Firstly, modifications to the Outlook settings for enabling and disabling options will not proceed as planned. Secondly, the initiative for unified management of Teams and Outlook applications has also been temporarily shelved.

Retirement of Organization Data Types in Excel

One of the most significant announcements from Microsoft pertains to the impending retirement of the Organization data types feature in Excel. Set to be phased out within the next few months, Microsoft’s decision is grounded in the feature’s limited usage and the high costs associated with its ongoing development and maintenance. The company has acknowledged that it could not justify the resource expenditure given the low demand for this specific functionality.

Alternative Solutions

For users who found the Organization data types useful, Microsoft suggests utilizing the import feature within the Power BI application to access relevant data. A detailed guide on employing this function can be found in the official support article.

Official Statement

We will retire Organization data types in Microsoft Excel effective July 31, 2025. This feature has low usage and high ongoing sustaining costs.

Instead, we recommend customers switch to the Get Data > From Power BI import feature on the Data ribbon in Excel to import data from Power BI or an add-in to create custom rich entities for the organization.

This retirement affects Excel for Windows desktop, Excel for Mac desktop, Excel for the web, and Excel for iOS/Android.

After this retirement, we will remove the Organization option from the Data Types gallery on the Data tab on the ribbon, and users will not be able to convert values to new organization types. Existing data in workbooks that used the Organization data type will be preserved but will no longer refresh. This change will have no impact on Bing data types, which we will continue to support.

Where to Find More Information

Users with access to the M365 Admin Center can locate more information regarding these changes under message ID MC1072405. For additional insights, refer to the article on Neowin.

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