
In some situations Info(), Cell() and SumIf() can also be volatile. Other volatile functions are Today(), Randbetween(), Offset() and Indirect(). Microsoft calls NOW() and similar functions ‘volatile’ because their values can change even if no other cells have changed.

In other words, you should be able to glance at a worksheet and know it’s up to the second but that’s not possible with Excel ‘out of the box’.
Night shift mac automatic update#
Some external factor is needed to make Excel update Now() and the rest of the worksheet. But if there’s nothing to make that happen, Now() doesn’t change value. The NOW() function updates to the latest date and time whenever Excel recalculates the worksheet. In fact, there’s no exposed controls for the Stock or Geo data types. That means you can’t setup an automatic data refresh, as you would with normal data connections. They are data connections to external sources but do NOT appear as Excel Data Connections. The Stock and Geo data types are curious beasts. Instead of having a nice automatic ‘ticker’, we’re expected to click ‘Refresh’ to get the latest prices. Users will want their worksheets to grab the latest prices automatically, something the current preview releases can’t do. With the Stock Data Type the ability to update automatically is more important. Here’s some situations where forcing data refresh or recalculation might be necessary or prudent.

As it stands, we need workarounds to make it happen. Ideally, Excel would have an overall setting to refresh the worksheet every ‘n’ seconds or minutes. In other words, modern Excel has changed in ways that Microsoft hasn’t yet fully adapted to. These days there are situations where cells change value but Excel does NOT update the worksheet. Normally Excel will update itself when you change a cell value. These tricks are more important with the Stock data type in Excel for Microsoft 365 customers. There are several ways to make Excel automatically refresh data connections and recalculate a worksheet.
