Microsoft makes Excel’s formulas easier, adds new features

Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it is making formulas easier in its spreadsheet service Excel with new features.

The new features are designed to help save users’ time and make them learn more about Excel formulas, the tech giant said in a blogpost.

The company introduced five new features in Excel for the web which include– ‘Formula Suggestions’, ‘Formula by Example’, ‘Suggested Links’, the ability to add a search bar in the queries pane and the ‘IMAGE Function’.

With the Formula Suggestions feature, when a user types the ” sign in a cell or the formula bar, Excel will automatically suggest the best formula based on contextual insights from the data.

Whereas, with the ‘Formula by Example’ feature, the spreadsheet will now suggest users to fill the entire column with a formula in case it identifies a pattern when users are performing manual and repetitive data entry in a column.

The tech giant also introduced four new features in Excel for Windows– the ability to add a keyboard shortcut to open the power query editor, create nested power query data types (Insiders), add get data from dynamic arrays (Insiders), and ‘IMAGE Function’.

Users can now press Alt + F12 (Win32) or Option + F12 (Mac) to open the Power Query Editor quickly.

Whereas, with the ability to create nested power query data types, users can now organise their data even better by creating nested data types. This feature is currently rolling out to Insiders users for Windows.

Microsoft is also rolling out the ‘IMAGE Function’ feature for Mac which allows users to insert images into cells from a source location, along with the alternative text.

(With inputs from IANS)