Excel Adds New Data Types
Written by Kay Ewbank   
Friday, 06 July 2018

New types have been added to Excel that rely on AI to recognize rich data types such as countries. The first data types to be added are Stocks and Geography, but more will be added in the future.

The AI behind the new types comes from Microsoft Knowledge Graph, the same intelligent service that powers Bing. This allows Excel to recognize, in context, whether there's a specific meaning for a piece of text  so it can be converted to a specific type of data. The feature relies on Excel having a cloud connection, hence the introduction into Office 365, Microsoft's online Office offering.

The Geography data type includes information such as States, Countries, Zip Codes and Cities.

bingai2

The Stocks data includes ticker symbols, fund names, and company names. Most importantly, the current stock price is also included and can be fetched when required.

The Geography data type means Excel would recognize that Colombia was a country, and as such as attributes such as population size and gross domestic product. Users will be able to take those properties and use them in other cells or formulae, and if the details change, the up-to-date figures will be reflected in the cells.

 

bingai

The new feature appears in the Excel Data tab, and when a choice is ambiguous, Excel will offer different options to the user. More organizational data types are planned to be added in the future.

The facility draws not just on the Knowledge Graph, but on a new service called Skydance that sends strings to the graph. There are also new elements to the user interface to allow users to work with the Knowledge Graph’s results. 

Knowledge Graph (aka Bing Satori) is based on work by Microsoft Research. It is a graph-based repository that uses the Resource Description Framework and the SPARQL query language. It is based on Trinity, Microsoft Research's distributed, in-memory, large graph processing engine.

 excel

More Information

Microsoft Explanation Of New Data Types

Microsoft Research Trinity

Related Articles

Google Search Goes Semantic - The Knowledge Graph

Amazon Neptune Graph Database

Visualizing Graph Data

Google Cayley Graph Database

Sparql moves closer

Azure Updates Announced At MS Connect()

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Banner


Crazy Clocks
10/03/2024

It's that time again when the clocks change and  time is of the essence and I indulge my interest in crazy clocks. I am always surprised that there are still new ideas for how to display the time [ ... ]



Google Adds Multiple Database Support To Firestore
04/03/2024

Google has announced the general availability of Firestore Multiple Databases, which can be used to manage multiple Firestore databases within a single Google Cloud project.


More News

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Friday, 06 July 2018 )