Excel has long been Turing Complete.

That is, many people have written Game of Life implementations in Excel. (Eg, https://github.com/Rich5/Excel-Game-of-Life ), and GoL is Turing Complete ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life ).

Being able to create and call recursively defined functions is not a pre-requisite for Turing Completeness.

For those who want to read the underlying MS product announcement: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/announcing... .