By David Crowther
QGIS 3.8 Zanzibar was released in August 2019 and the full change log can be viewed here:
https://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog38/index.html
One great new enhancement is that QGIS is now even more interoperable with direct support for all common spreadsheets, including MS Excel.
Opening an MS Excel File
In previous versions of QGIS, you had to use the Data Source Manager Tab to add a Delimited Text File, which meant you had to save your XLS file as another format e.g. CSV.
In QGIS 3.8 and onwards, you can now simply drag and drop an XLS file into the Layers Panel. Once added to the Layer Panel, right click and choose to Open Attributes and the records of data will be shown.
Or using the Brower Panel you can navigate to the location of the XLS file and open it directly.
Another great enhancement to QGIS that makes working with spatial and attribute data even easier!