Microsoft wants to avoid causing more headaches with one of the most complicated functions of Excel, the spreadsheet program belonging to the suite formerly known as Office 365 (now named Microsoft 365). The company, specifically, has announced a new update for the web version with a function that will allow you to generate formulas automatically through suggestions.
The function, called “Formula Suggestions” It allows, as its name indicates, to let Excel suggest a formula related to the rest of the content that the user has previously entered in the cell, column or row. To do this, the author or editor of that spreadsheet will only have to write the “=” sign in the cell or in the formula bar located at the top of the screen.
Excel will automatically display the most appropriate options, which may be the following: sum, average, count, number count, min and max. The user will only have to click on the most convenient one.
In this way, if, for example, we need to calculate the total of a list of income and at the end of the column we write “Total”, Excel will recommend the sum formula. Of course, it will also do the operation automatically. The function, yes. It’s only available in English and, we reiterate, only in the web version of Excel.
Other news coming to Microsoft Excel
Microsoft has also included a couple of additional functions that will save the user time when filling out spreadsheets. One of them is the call “Formula for example”. This one, in particular, makes Excel able to suggest filling the entire column with a formula if it detects that the user is following a pattern, as shown in this example. The second feature is called “suggested links” and allows you to automatically correct broken links to cloud workbooks.
Excel for Windows, meanwhile, also gets some exciting features in its latest update. Now it is possible to add a keyboard shortcut to open the Power Query editor. In addition, a new function called IMAGE is added that allows insert images into cells and add alternative text. “Your images can now be part of the worksheet, instead of floating on top. You can move and resize cells, sort and filter, and work with images within an Excel table,” Microsoft explains. This last feature is also available in Excel for Mac.
