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

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.

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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.

These data types work by cramming a set of structured data into a single cell in Excel that can then be referenced by the rest of the spreadsheet. Data can also be refreshed to keep it up to date.