Microsoft Just Added New Features to Excel
On May 31st, Microsoft released a roundup of improvements, upgrades, and enhancements it plans to bring to Microsoft Excel across the web, Windows, and MacOS, according to XDA.
According to the article, Microsoft rolled out new features with Excel throughout the month as part of the company’s effort to retain existing customers while attracting new ones. Marking some long-requested features as Feedback in Action (FIN), Microsoft highlighted its commitment to prioritising customer requests for continuously fortifying its services and offering proactive working experiences with Excel.
‘Microsoft values customer feedback, and every day the company looks at feedback from users across its diverse products and services on all platforms,’ explained the company. ‘By providing clear feedback, you can make the greatest impact on the products and features you’d like to see or improve.’
With high-end enhancements introduced consistently, Microsoft expects to make Excel for the Web as efficient as Excel for desktop.
This May, with Excel’s web version, Microsoft introduced a high-end extension generally available for web users “Add Option to Share Table Context Menu.” It enables users to highlight the Table in their workbook while also allowing them to generate and share a link to the table by clicking the Table option in the right-click menu.
Next up, Excel for the web now offers ‘proper’ and high-end date support. Earlier, dates that were identified as strings will now be recognised as date-and-time objects enabling proper time-based sorting and filtering for date fields within the PivotTable. However, for now, the functionality is limited within Power BI PivotTable and can’t be used outside, such as in formulas.
In addition, Microsoft has announced it will enable support for implicit measures in Power BI-connected PivotTables. With this new enhanced feature, Excel now supports drag-and-drop aggregations (SUM, AVG, MAX, MIN, COUNT, DAX, etc.) of fields that no longer require users to pre-define the measures (i.e., explicit measures).
Furthermore, as part of its effort to provide readers with an augmented and customisable reading experience, Microsoft has introduced Immersive Reading with Excel. Now natively built into Excel, Microsoft Immersive Reader fortifies the reading and writing experience for people regardless of their ability by allowing them to listen to the text read aloud or to adjust how text appears by customising colour, spacing, etc.
‘Immersive Reader shows text,’ said Microsoft in a blog post. ‘Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are each highlighted in a different colour, and additional spacing is added between words and letters.’
Switching to Excel for Windows, the tech behemoth is bringing out multiple new features to augment user experience with Narrator, a screen-reading app built into Windows 11.
In addition, Microsoft now allows Excel for Windows users to customise narrator experience with keyboard shortcuts. This new enhancement to the Narrator experience is expected to offer a more succinct and efficient reading experience while working in Microsoft Excel.
Microsoft has confirmed that it has rolled out the ‘Proper Date Support for PBI PivotTables,’ and ‘Implicit Measures Support for PBI PivotTables’ in the Current Channel.
Microsoft Excel is considered the most popular data analytics, visualisation, and spreadsheet platform for its flexibility and ease of use. Between 1.1 and 1.5 billion people and 81% of businesses use Excel for efficiently organising, formatting, organising, and recapitulating large volumes of datasets.
That said, rolling out multiple enhancements and equipping Excel with AI is tied to Microsoft’s effort to make the spreadsheet platform more productive.
However, Excel still doesn’t natively support some charts that professionals frequently use while building PowerPoint presentations, which can makes working in Excel painstaking and arduous. For people looking to create professional-looking PowerPoint presentations with stunning charts, leveraging high-end PowerPoint add-in services like think-cell is a sensible decision. By automating PowerPoint work and enhancing slide creation quality and efficiency, a PowerPoint add-in allows users to create great-looking and well-laid-out presentations with high-quality charts.
Introducing new improvements and upgrades is part of Microsoft’s long-term strategy to deliver a proactive customer experience. However, in the recent roundup detailing the changelog in Excel, the company didn’t have a separate segment for Excel for Mac.
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