Microsoft Excel update adds advanced text analytics features and integration with Microsoft Forms
Microsoft has unveiled new updates for Excel, focusing on advanced text analysis and seamless integration with Microsoft Forms.
Here's What We Know
One of the key improvements are the text analysis tools supported by Microsoft Copilot. They enable comprehensive text summaries and topic identification. Copilot also provides smarter search queries and tips by identifying key topics in content, which involves first-class sorting and allows you to validate results with raw data.
Microsoft has also extended the integration of Python into Excel by providing access to the NLTK library. This allows users to create word clouds, visualise word frequency patterns and perform more sophisticated text analysis. For users who prefer traditional methods, three new regular expression functions have been added to simplify working with text patterns: REGEXTEST (checks text for specific patterns), REGEXEXTRACT (retrieves text strings based on patterns), and REGEXREPLACE (replaces text strings with new strings).
Microsoft has also added Forms to Excel, making it easier to collect and validate data. Starting with version 2410, users can add forms directly to tables via the Insert tab. This tool is already available for Windows, and will be coming soon on macOS.
Many of these features are already available, and some are still in beta testing or limited to certain regions.
Source: drwindows
