In the past two columns, we’ve looked at higher-order functions and talked a little bit about the power of functional programming. So far, the concepts we’ve covered do little to indicate how powerful ...

is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft Excel used to only allow two types of data: text and numbers.

Over the past few years, there has been a subtle but significant shift in the way that data is structured in databases. Whereas yesterday’s databases were typically limited to storing data in rows and ...