No matter what changes Microsoft makes to its software or how much fresh competition it faces across its suite of products, one thing remains true: spreadsheet junkies use Excel.

Shipped for the first time 34 years ago, Excel is the default product used for entering data and performing calculations, and it's continued to be a key piece of Microsoft Office, which is still a huge revenue driver at the company.

So when Microsoft announces one of its biggest Excel updates in years, no matter how wonky, power users start chattering. On Wednesday, Microsoft introduced a feature called XLOOKUP, which was designed to address some of the shortcomings of one of Excel's most popular features, VLOOKUP.

Since releasing version 1.0 of Excel for Macintosh in 1985, the software included VLOOKUP to help users carry over information from one part of a spreadsheet to another. According to a Microsoft blog post on Wednesday, it was the third most-used function, after SUM and AVERAGE. The V stands for vertical, a reference to the function's ability to retrieve information in vertical columns. A similar function called HLOOKUP works with data that's in horizontal rows.