Microsoft recently rolled out several updates to its Office 365 suite, including intelligent search capabilities in SharePoint and new data types in Excel.
The Excel spreadsheet software will now have machine learning based Geography and Stock data types. Microsoft already uses these data types in its Bing search engine.
With the new data types, Excel will be smart enough to understand the entries related to geography and stock. For example, when a user enters a city in the sheet, he/she can access a number of attributes, like population, area, GDP etc. about that location using the Geography button, right within Excel.
Image Source: Microsoft
The Stock data type will help users to insert detailed information like fund names, share prices, ticker symbols of companies, etc. in the sheet.
Microsoft said that it will soon add options to pull information from Microsoft Graph and insert directly in the Excel sheet.
Additionally, several desktop features of Excel have been added to Excel Online. These features include inserting Pivot Tables, deleting rows and columns, inserting images from local storage, changing color of tabs, etc.
Intelligent and customized search option, available in SharePoint Online, is now being rolled out to the Office 365 subscribers. It will allow users to discover people, information and expertise across the organization using the personalized search experience.
Microsoft is bringing the SharePoint hub sites to Office 365 subscribers. “SharePoint hub sites are a new, flexible building block for corporate intranets that bring together news, activity, search, and navigation from across SharePoint team sites and SharePoint communication sites.,” wrote Microsoft in a blog post.
The updates also include a new web part, using which organizations can add conversations and feeds from Yammer to any SharePoint site or webpage.
Also read: Microsoft and Adobe alliance now extends to China
Furthermore, the tech giant has expanded its cloud infrastructure with datacenters in new geographies, including France, the UAE, and Switzerland. This will help organizations meet compliance requirements of storing customer data within a country’s boundaries, while digitally transforming themselves with Office 365.
Microsoft has been continuously adding intelligent features to all its products. Last month, it added intelligent communication and collaboration features to Microsoft Teams, and released new faster, smarter and personalized version of its web-based client Outlook.com.
