Each month, the Office team delivers a payload of features to the productivity suite as part of its new push to treat the software as a service in need of constant maintenance and upgrades. For the most part, the updates have been relatively benign in retrospect but ultimately useful in the grand scheme of the evolution of the productivity.
For the month of March, however, the Office team is bringing a really neat new feature to its Excel program that enables new cloud-connected data types. The rollout of new data types begins with Stocks and Geography and will understandably be powered by the Microsoft Knowledge Graph to help enhance Excel reports with modified graphs and detailed real-world constructs.
In addition to these new data types in Excel, here’s a recap of this month’s Office activity:
- Intelligent, personalized search: New search capabilities that enable the discovery of people, information and expertise from across your organization are now rolling out to all Office 365 subscribers. Now, wherever you start your search in SharePoint of Office.com—you get consistent, personalized results powered by the Microsoft Graph.
- SharePoint Hub Sites: This month we began rolling out SharePoint hub sites, which bring together news, activity, search, and navigation across SharePoint team and SharePoint communication sites.
- Office 365 for U.S. Government: At the Government Tech Summit in Washington DC, we announced the general availability of Microsoft 365 for U.S. Government, enabling government agencies across the United States to transform through digitizing citizen services and modernizing workplaces.
In addition to working on the new data type deliverables, the Office team as managed to expand its overall cloud infrastructure by building a local data center in France and made an announcement that other centers will be sprouting up in Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates as well as new cloud options being offered to Office 365 customers in Germany.
Microsoft has paved a clear path for its transition away from Windows and into cloud-based platforms and with the updates such as these, it’s clear that the company as the foundation in place to continue the growth of Office and expansion of its cloud ambitions.
