Microsoft officials recently announced on Tuesday, during its Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando, that the company is going to launch in early 2018 the new version of Microsoft Excel, which is coming smarter due to a new algorithm and better worldwide connection. According to the company’s blog, it will also offer a non-subscription version for the public that prefers to try the program’s new advances before buying the complete version.
Microsoft Excel will soon come more connected not only to the outside world but also with the user. The program will learn certain aspects of the user’s work to bring from the internet everything that the algorithm considers would be beneficial for it, as Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s general manager for Office, and Rob Howard, the company’s director of Office 365 ecosystem marketing, said at the conference.
It was also announced that the company would offer a public and complete packet with Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and server apps like Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business. Additionally, there are some rumors that Excel will also be available for the Apple Mac, but anything has been confirmed by Microsoft officials yet.
Both the Office 2019 complete and public preview version will come with totally new impressive analysis and visual-animation features, like improved inking (pressure sensitivity, tilt effects, ink replay), formulas and charts for Excel, and the PowerPoint Morph and Zoom.
The American multinational technology company also said that people would be able to manage this version very easily because the developers added it new usability, voice and security features.
“We’re pleased to introduce new data types,” said Jared Spataro on the conference. “That doesn’t sound all that interesting and we had this interesting discussion about what we’d name these things, but at the end of the day we realized that if you’re really an Excel wonk, the thing that you’re going to get is that there’s new data types.”
Microsoft Excel, smarter than ever
This new Excel version will be able to differentiate two particular companies within one same list, according to Microsoft officials, due to its algorithm. The program will extract information about one specific company from Microsoft’s Bing API – including stock data and market cap.
Excel will also differentiate if the user creates a list of people, enterprises or cities, to then provide it with information that’s usually obtained from tedious analysis, like population data and others.
The “Insight Service” will remark interesting information for the user to make it visible as “one of the most important.” However, this is something already found in Google Sheets. “It is meant to take any list of data and then start to generate insights,” which later “will look at combinations, charts, pivot tables” to recognize the most impressive by “looking at outliers, looking at trends in the data, looking at things that represent changes.”
“Cloud-powered innovation is a major theme at Ignite this week. But we recognize that moving to the cloud is a journey with many considerations along the way,” according to Microsoft’s general manager for Office. “Office 2019 will be a valuable upgrade for customers who feel that they need to keep some or all of their apps and servers on-premises, and we look forward to sharing more details about the release in the coming months.”
Source: TechCrunch