![]() The software will be looking for a data type for which it can search the web and find additional information. With the help of Microsoft’s Bing API, Excel 2019 will attempt to understand even more. Contextualize your data by pulling from the web When you input data into Excel, the software tries to detect whether you’ve entered text, a date, currency, etc. If Excel can take a light and unobtrusive touch with these automated graph suggestions, the feature could be helpful. Therefore, data visualization will be essential. The spreadsheets of tomorrow will contain more data than we’ve ever had to wrangle before. Will Excel’s Insights suggestions be much much better? Usefulness: Medium. Office 97’s annoying paperclip was notoriously bad at predicting what you were trying to do and what you needed help with. ![]() This feature sounds like an artificially intelligent Clippy, which is a terrifying thought. “It will look at combinations, charts, pivot tables and it will recognize those that are most interesting by looking at outliers, looking at trends in the data, looking at things that represent changes.” While visualization is indeed an important, almost necessary tool for understanding data, my hesitation with this feature comes from past trauma inflicted by Microsoft Office’s automated helpers. ![]() “It is meant to take any list of data and then start to generate insights,” says Jared Spataro, the Excel team member who demoed TechCrunch. Microsoft touts their “Insights” as a feature that identifies interesting information and presents it graphically-and automatically-to users. Abacus has a feature called Insights that helps you understand your spending through data visualization. It makes information contextual and accessible almost tangible. Automatically generate data visualizations Visualization is an essential analytic technique in the era of big data. Just like VisiCalc got PCs on corporate desks en masse, spreadsheet software could also bring machine learning to a desktop near you. If this feature allows teams to start using machine learning as routinely as they build pivot tables, Excel 2019 might ultimately mark the moment when AI fully democratized for the business world. This isn’t something everyone’s going to use immediately, but it marks an important moment for tech-forward Excel jockeys and machine learning beginners alike. Starting with this new release, Excel will be able to import these algorithms directly, and presumably, run them inside the software. Import machine learning models into Excel Machine learning-the brains behind artificial intelligence-is a powerful method of data processing that lets algorithms find patterns in large datasets. To learn more about how AI is changing your finance team, check out The CFO’s Guide to AI Strategy. Here are three new things Excel 2019 will be able to do, ranked according to the likelihood of you actually using them: Whether the features will be useful is a different story. In the demo, Microsoft touted three new features of Excel that promise to bring AI to your spreadsheets in the near future. We don’t know a lot about the new capabilities beyond what Microsoft has sketched out in a blog post and demoed for TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois, but from what the team has shown so far, Excel 2019 will be able to understand more about your data and contextualize it with external information. The headline item from the closed-doors unveiling was the news that Excel, for the first time, will include capabilities that let teams work with machine learning algorithms inside the legendary spreadsheet software. Last week Microsoft offered the world a sneak peek of Excel 2019, which is due to start rolling out early next year.
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