A new Excel feature may not be so exciting for the commoner. But, this new upcoming feature will without a doubt be ground-breaking for people who have to tirelessly draft up spreadsheets daily, going through each cell and entering the designated data.
AI-Powered Scanning
On Friday, Microsoft announced a new feature for the Excel Android App. The new feature will allow Excel users to convert a picture of data on a printed sheet to an editable table in the app. Microsoft is allegedly using artificial intelligence to implement this feature.
Data entry just became easier! You can now take a picture of a printed data table and automatically convert it into a fully editable @msExcel spreadsheet. Rolling out to #Android users and coming soon to #iOS! Learn more: https://t.co/MLEsEidGA4 pic.twitter.com/4Bi3ulDLPx
— Microsoft Office News (@OfficeNews) February 28, 2019
Microsoft has also given us a video demonstration as we can see in the tweet above.
The feature is currently only available to Microsoft 365 users on Android. However, the feature will soon roll out to iOS users as well. You can read more about the feature on Microsoft’s website.
Back in September 2018, Microsoft also announced another “AI-powered insights service” called Ideas. This feature was being built to help users identify patterns in their data-set in Excel and to suggest users tips and ideas when creating documents in Office apps . Microsoft has not given us a update on the feature yet but hopefully it will be implemented soon as Microsoft promised.
Microsoft And Smart Recognition
This would not be the first time that Microsoft has involved itself in the smart recognition field before. Microsoft previously launched the Office Lens app for the Windows Phone, it was later added to iOS and Android.
The Office lens app sported a similar feature to what Microsoft just added to Excel. The app had the ability to quickly scan and format whiteboards, receipts, hand-written documents and more. It’s smart functionality results from optical character recognition, this enables the app to capture an enormous amount of detail and convert physical documents into Word files.