{"id":44974,"date":"2017-09-27T09:29:53","date_gmt":"2017-09-27T09:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=44974"},"modified":"2017-09-27T09:29:53","modified_gmt":"2017-09-27T09:29:53","slug":"microsoft-excel-get-lot-smarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/technology\/microsoft-excel-get-lot-smarter.html","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Excel is about to get a lot smarter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft Excel is about to get a lot smarter<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Microsoft Excel is about to get a lot smarter:-Microsoft Excel users rejoice. Your favorite spreadsheet is about to get a lot smarter, thanks to the help of machine learning and a better connection to the outside world.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Jared Spataro, Microsoft\u2019s general manager for Office, and Rob Howard, the company\u2019s director of Office 365 ecosystem marketing, showed me during a briefing at the company\u2019s Ignite conference today, Excel will soon be able to understand more about your inputs and then pull additional information from the internet as necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re pleased to introduce new data types,\u201d Spataro explained. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t sound all that interesting and we had this interesting discussion about what we\u2019d name these things, but at the end of the day we realized that if you\u2019re really an Excel wonk, the thing that you\u2019re going to get is that there\u2019s new data types.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t just a feature for Excel wonks, though. In today\u2019s demo, Spataro showed me how you will soon be able to tag a list of company names as \u2014 well \u2014 company names, for example. Once you\u2019ve done that, Excel can pull in more information about the company from Microsoft\u2019s Bing API, including stock data and market cap, for example. Excel can even automatically detect that a list of names is indeed a list of company names or a list of cities, for example, which then allows you to pull in population data, among other things.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHistorically, Excel has always been good at numbers and you can enter in text and use conditional formatting and things like that,\u201d Spataro said. \u201cWe are adding the idea that Excel can now recognize data types that are richer than those two.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, the Office team is also launching a new built-in tool for Excel that will automatically try to pull the most interesting data from a spreadsheet and visualize it. \u201cInsights,\u201d as the company is currently calling it, is modeled on a very similar feature in the Power BI data visualization and analysis tool, and it\u2019s worth noting that Google Sheets also offers a comparable tool. \u201cIt is meant to take any list of data and then start to generate insights,\u201d Spataro said. \u201cIt will look at combinations, charts, pivot tables and it will recognize those that are most interesting by looking at outliers, looking at trends in the data, looking at things that represent changes.\u201d If you like one of the graphs the service generates, you can easily import those into your Excel sheets and manipulate them to your heart\u2019s content.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Microsoft also announced earlier this week, Excel will soon be able to pull in machine learning models that a company\u2019s data scientists have created to analyze information in Excel, and you can also now use JavaScript to write more complex scripts for manipulating data or pulling in data from virtually any third-party service with an API.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new data types will launch early next year. Insights will arrive in a spreadsheet near you in early 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Spataro also noted, these kind of connections to third-party service are what differentiates Office 365 from the perpetual versions of Office. \u201cServices breathe new life into these applications,\u201d he said. \u201cWe think these apps still have a lot of life in them for just working on your content, but we do believe that these connections just makes it magical.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If you do want a perpetual license for Office, though, and not pay a subscription fee, you are in luck, because as the company also announced today, the next perpetual version of Office will launch in the second half of 2018, and, because that\u2019s almost 2019, it will be called Office 2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCloud-powered innovation is a major theme at Ignite this week. But we recognize that moving to the cloud is a journey with many considerations along the way,\u201d Spataro writes in today\u2019s announcement. \u201cOffice 2019 will be a valuable upgrade for customers who feel that they need to keep some or all of their apps and servers on-premises, and we look forward to sharing more details about the release in the coming months.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2017\/09\/26\/microsoft-excel-is-about-to-get-a-lot-smarter\/<\/span><\/p>\n

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