@dang the original source seems clearer:<p>Announcing LAMBDA: Turn Excel formulas into custom functions<p><a href="https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing-lambda-turn-excel-formulas-into-custom-functions/ba-p/1925546" rel="nofollow">https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing...</a>
I think the biggest improvement this will have is in keeping things tidy and facilitating reuse. Yes, recursion is nice, but I suspect that it's not going to see much use compared to just replacing repeated formulas with simple functions.<p>Of course this also means that Excel becomes even more of a slippery slope towards programming generally, which can only be a good thing.
It’s not clear from the documentation [0] whether this also adds lambda values (i.e. enabling higher-order functions).<p>[0] <a href="https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-bd212d27-1cd1-4321-a34a-ccbf254b8b67" rel="nofollow">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...</a>
"LAMBDA allows you to define your own custom functions using Excel’s formula language. Excel already allows you to define custom functions, but only by writing them in an entirely different language such as JavaScript. In contrast, LAMBDA allows you to define a custom function in Excel’s own formula language."