The new capability is available in a public preview on Android. 

Microsoft also said there are major improvements including the fact “lookup-type functions will now take seconds instead of minutes.” The company also introduced “Ideas” described as an AI-powered insights service, for Office and said it will be available in Excel soon with a preview of roll out to other apps starting with PowerPoint Online

Ideas will make suggestions tailored to tasks in which users are engaged. “In Excel, for instance, Ideas helps identify trends, patterns, and outliers in a data set—helping customers analyze and understand their data in seconds,” the company wrote in a Office 365 blog. Users can invoke Ideas by clicking on a lightning bolt icon.

In terms of supported data types, real-world concepts are being added, starting with Stocks and Geography, which will be generally available in October. Also AI-powered, the capability can covert a piece of text into “an interactive entity containing layers of rich information.” 

For example, a list of countries in a workbook can be converted into geography Entities, with customers have the ability to weave location data into an analysis of their own data. As data types are added, “Excel’s rows, columns, cells, logic engine, and tools can be used to organize, analyze, and reason over any combination of numbers and sophisticated entities,” according to the blog entry.

Microsoft is also utilizing dynamics arrays to make advanced formulas easier to us. “Using dynamic arrays, any formula that returns an array of values will seamlessly “spill” into neighboring unoccupied cells, making it as easy to get an array of values returned as it is to work on a single cell,” the company wrote. Dynamic arrays is now available to users signed up for the Office 365 Insiders Program.

New functions can be used to build spreadsheets are UNIQUE, SORT, SORTBY, SEQUENCE, SINGLE, and RANDARRAY. Microsoft said instead of writing many complex formulas to solve a multi-cell problems, users can write a simple formula and have an array of values returned.

Bob Scott

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Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards.  Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He  has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that.  A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind