Almost every office job involves using Microsoft Excel. It’s useful. It’s versatile. Yet it can be frustrating at times. We use it to get things done, but I doubt many of us would claim to love it. That’s why I am excited about the changes Microsoft announced that it would bring to the iconic tool in the near future. Disclaimer: I own some Microsoft stocks, but this post stems from my genuine excitement as a long-time perennial Excel user who, like most, suffers the pain of some mundane tasks for years.
Click on the headlines to see more details and demos from Microsoft
Stock quotes and geographic data
Input the names of stocks or companies that you want to analyze and Excel will provide built-in information & data related to the companies such as number of employees, shares outstanding, P/E…No more going to other websites and painstakingly gather such information.
If you are interested in geographic data, Excel will enable the same capability as it will for stock quotes. Type the list of countries’ names and related information such as population. gas price will be provided.
Data entry from a screenshot
Good news for Android device owners (not so much for iOS users). Soon, Android phone users will be able to take a photo of a data table and quickly have it converted into Excel table. How much time would have been saved if this feature had been here for the past 5-10 years? When will iOS folks have it Microsoft????
IdeasÂ
Prepare a clean data table and Excel will do the preliminary analysis for you. Charts will be drawn. Outliers will be identified. Summary will be offered. No need to waste more time clicking around.
I really look forward to these updates. Life would be much easier to have some mundane tasks automated. This is what computers and machine learning are great at and should be used for.
Minh Quang Duong 