Microsoft has announced it makes Excel autocomplete even smarter, at least in the web version that comes with Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365). Last week it announced formula suggestions and formula-by-example, both of which can help automate some of the things you had to do manually.
Formula suggestions are pretty much what it says on the tin: when you type the equals sign into a cell, Excel for the web intelligently tries to suggest the type of formula you should use, given the data around it. For example, if you have a full quarterly sales report and a column labeled “total” at the end, Excel may suggest adding up the range of cells. According to a blog post from Microsoft, the function currently only works in English and suggests sum, average, count, counta, min, and max formulas. It’s certainly not a groundbreaking feature – Google Sheets has had something similar for a while now, and Excel AutoSum has long been a quick way to apply formulas to data, but for some use cases it can be a nice time saver.
Then there is Formula by example, similar to the Flash Fill function which can automatically detect patterns in data and fill in the rest of a column. The feature is a bit difficult to explain succinctly, but this video from Microsoft will give you an idea of ​​what it’s about; detect a pattern where you comb information from cells and then automatically generate a formula that saves you some typing.
I’ve tried trying out formula suggestions and formula examples on the web, but couldn’t really get it to show up. However, the blog post says the features are rolling out now, so it’s possible they just didn’t reach my account. For what it’s worth, I also checked the Excel desktop app for Windows and Mac, and they didn’t seem to have the autocomplete features either.
Microsoft’s blog post also includes several other feature announcements, though I’ll admit I’m not enough of a power user to really understand them – I’ll leave that to esports competitors like the field of the recently closed Microsoft Excel World Championship 2022.
There’s a feature for adding images with alt text to your tables coming to Windows, Mac, and the web, and the company is also adding nested Power Query data types and the ability to pull data from dynamic arrays to the Insider version of get the Windows app for testing. Another potentially useful (and thankfully easy to understand) feature coming to the web is “suggested links,” which automatically fixes broken links to other workbooks stored in the cloud.
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