Microsoft has announced that it will make Excel’s autocomplete feature smarter, at least in the web version that comes with Microsoft 365 – formerly known as Office 365.
Last week, the company revealed new suggestions for formulating equations that may help automate some of the things the user had to do manually.
To explain the formula suggestions feature we take this example:
If you type the equal sign (=) in a cell, Excel will try to intelligently suggest what type of formula you should use, given the data in the cells around it.
For clarity, let’s take a practical example:
If you have a whole number of quarterly sales figures and a column at the end labeled “Total,” Excel might suggest summing up and summarizing the cells in the column labeled “Total.”
According to a blog post from Microsoft, the feature currently only works in English and will suggest equations for sum, average, number, minimum number, and maximum.
Microsoft is certainly not the first to introduce this feature, as Google Sheets has had a similar feature for a while.
There is an equation fill-in-by-example given feature, and it can detect patterns in the data automatically and fill in the rest of the column.
It is difficult to explain the feature briefly, but this video from Microsoft gives you an idea about this feature. The feature detects the formula’s formatting pattern by collecting information from the cells and then automatically generates the formula’s formula.
The blog notes that the features have been rolled out, however, it is possible that they have not reached all users.
The Microsoft blog post also includes several other feature announcements. There’s a function for adding images with alt text to your tables. Another potentially useful (and easy to understand) feature coming to the web version of Excel is Suggested Links, which will help you fix outdated links. in tables automatically.
