Microsoft Office becomes smarter – TechCrunch

Microsoft used its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, today to announce a number of new features for Office 365. Since the company is currently focusing on AI, it is not not surprising that most of these new features. This means that all your Office applications, online and offline, will soon become a little easier to use and offer you additional support.

The most interesting of these new features is called Ideas. With Ideas, Microsoft deploys a unified experience in tools such as Excel and PowerPoint (with more to follow), which aim to save you time in your daily tasks. This can be a specific design and layout in PowerPoint, or find pictures for your presentation. In Excel, Ideas can suggest the graphics to use or help you discover outliers in your data. This feature is now generally available in Excel and available in PowerPoint Online as a preview in the near future. It is likely that we will see it soon in other Office applications. And yes, do not hesitate to insert your own favorite Clippy joke here.

Excel also receives some new features of AI. Microsoft previously announced data types in Excel at Ignite 2017 – and was previewed this year. Now, this feature, which helps you turn references to stocks and geographies into rich data that you can easily extend and manipulate in a spreadsheet, is usually available. The company also brings an image recognition to Excel. This clever new tool allows you to convert an image from a data array to … you guessed it … an Excel file. The name of this tool? Image data. It is now available in public preview.

Microsoft also notes that Excel speeds up the process by speeding up search-like functions.

There is another new feature here, which does not directly affect the AI, but will make the use of Office easier. Microsoft Search is a new search feature that will soon be deployed on Bing and Office.com (and later on Microsoft Edge, Windows, and Office) and will use Bing's Microsoft Graph and AI tech data to provide a more consistent search experience. . .

Microsoft notes that these new search features will also be able to index internal documents so that you can now ask questions such as "Can I take my wife and kids on a business trip?" And consult an HR document informing you that you can not not .