Microsoft Makes New Features for Excel, Unfortunately New Available in Microsoft 365

Microsoft announced it had created an Excel automation. (photo: screenshot of youtube)

JAKARTA - Microsoft announced that it has made the automation of Excel even smarter, at least in the web version included with Microsoft 365. Last week it announced formula suggestions and formulas with examples, both of which can help automate some of the things you have to do manually.

The formula suggestions are pretty much what they say in the cell: if you type an equal sign into the cell, Excel for the web will try to intelligently suggest what type of formula you should use, based on the surrounding data.

For example, if you have many quarterly sales figures and the column at the end is labeled "total," Excel might suggest summing the range of cells.

According to a blog post from Microsoft, the feature currently only works in English, and will suggest sum, average, count, min, and max formulas. It's not a groundbreaking feature, of course because Google Sheets has had something similar for a while, and Excel's AutoSum has long been a quick way to apply formulas to data. But for some use cases it can be a great time saver.

Then there is Formula by Example, which is similar to the Flash Fill feature which can automatically detect patterns in data and fill in other columns. The features are a bit hard to succinctly describe, but a video from Microsoft gives you an idea of ​​what they are. It even detects patterns where you comb information from cells and then automatically creates formulas that save you typing.

The Verge journalist currently tries to test formula suggestions and formulas with examples on the web but can't actually display them. The blog post says the features are now rolling out, so maybe they haven't logged into their account yet.

On checking the Excel desktop apps for Windows and Mac, it seems they don't have this autocomplete feature either.

Microsoft's blog post also includes a few other feature announcements, though I have to admit there aren't enough power users to really get a hang of them.

There is functionality for adding images with alt-text into your tables that appear to Windows, Mac, and the web, and Microsoft is also adding nested Power Query data types and the ability to get data from dynamic arrays to Insider versions of Windows apps for testing.

One other potentially useful and easy-to-understand feature that has hit the web is "suggested links," which will automatically help you fix broken links to other workbooks stored in the cloud.