The need to persist data created at runtime is as old as computing. And the need to store object-oriented data cropped up when object-oriented programming became pervasive. Currently, most modern, ...

Any data that does not fall into the traditional field structure (alpha, numeric, dates) of a relational DBMS. Examples of complex data types are bills of materials, word processing documents, maps, ...

is a senior editor and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft is overhauling Excel with the ability to support custom live data types.