When you see a data table in a book or some printed papers that you want to add and edit to your documents, you have no choice except to actually manually copy each entry into an Excel sheet, which, depending on how long or how many the items are, will take you a million years or so. But recent updates and changes that Microsoft is bringing to Excel may make things a little bit easier for those kinds of situations.
Excel is actually introducing four new features that are Artificial Intelligence driven: Ideas, New data types, Insert Data from Picture, and Dynamic Arrays. All of them are meant to make the program more powerful for users who rely on it to make their jobs easier. Most of them are desktop features so we will not be focusing on them but one stands out for Android users: the ability to insert and convert data from a picture.
The Insert Data from Picture functions as its name says. You can take a picture of any data table, whether it’s hand-drawn or printed. Use your Android device’s camera to capture that image and then with a single click on the Excel mobile app, it will be able to convert that analog information into a spreadsheet. It will be a fully editable table converted through new image recognition functionality.
However, this new feature is not yet available for majority of Excel users. Those who are signed up for the Office 365 Insiders Program will be able to have access to this feature through their Android Excel app soon, although no specific date has been indicated.
As for the other features, some are also coming soon while the others are already available for those in the Insiders Program as well. Performance improvements are already rolling out to users of the Excel in Office 365 starting today.
SOURCE: Microsoft
