Excel’s REDUCE is clever, but this old-school function is what I trust

Excel keeps rolling out sophisticated functions for advanced array manipulation, and I truly appreciate that. After all, who doesn’t want a better way to work in Excel? The REDUCE function, one of Excel’s new group of functions, is a perfect example. Its ability to collapse a range of values into a single accumulated result using custom LAMBDA functions almost feels like sci-fi. Yet, cleverness, as exciting as it is, isn’t always what I need in a spreadsheet.