M365 Changelog: Edit your workbooks now with ActiveX

MC261532 – Delighting Microsoft’s customers with faster, smoother, and frictionless experiences in Excel for the web is an uncompromised goal across the Excel team. With this in mind, Microsoft recently added support to open and edit workbooks with ActiveX, Form controls and other legacy art objects in Excel web.

In response to customer feedback, this represents another step forward to help customers quickly open Excel files and edit them with less friction in the process. This communication is meant to highlight the changes our customers are asking for, and to reaffirm our commitment and ongoing investment in Excel for the web to enable rich end user experiences.

When this will happen:

Microsoft expects this rollout to begin in early June and target the rollout to be fully completed by early July.

How this will affect your organization:

Previously when opening a workbook with ActiveX controls or Form controls users would not be able to edit these files directly and would receive a warning telling them these features were unsupported. Users would be redirected to use the desktop version of Excel instead. Users could edit a copy of the document using Excel for the web, which would remove unsupported features.

Excel for the web now enables users to seamlessly open a document which has ActiveX controls, Form controls and other legacy art objects in it. The controls themselves are not usable in Excel for the web and are instead represented with a placeholder image in the workbook. Users no longer receive a warning message when opening their document and can quickly begin working in their document.

What you need to do to prepare:

You may want to notify your helpdesk to make them aware of these improvements, and to prepare them in response to Excel for the web changes / enhancement related helpdesk calls.