Microsoft adds more features to Excel, including a new image feature

As part of the December updates to Excel, Microsoft has made it possible to insert images into cells using a new feature. Here is all the news.

As it tends to do every month, Microsoft has highlighted all the new features it has added to Excel over the past month. There are some notable additions for December, available on Internet, Windows and macOS versions of the app.

The biggest new addition is one that Microsoft began testing with Office Insiders in August. That’s the new IMAGE feature, which lets you insert images directly from a source location into a cell. This feature also adds alt text for the image, making it readable for low vision users and making it easier to manipulate the images in an Excel worksheet. The IMAGE feature is available on the Web, Windows and Mac. Office Insiders can also try this feature on Android, although it is not yet available to everyone.

Apart from this, Excel on the Web has also received some major improvements. That includes the new formula suggestions, which analyze data in your cells and suggest formulas you may want to use in a particular cell. For example, a cell in a row named “total” after a series of numbers automatically suggests using the function SOM.

In addition, Excel can also suggest formulas based on examples from previous cells. If there is an identifiable pattern in the data you inserted earlier, Excel may suggest a formula to fill in the remaining cells in a specific range. You can see this in action below to understand how it works.

Other new additions include new suggestions to restore broken links for cloud work folders to which you may have linked. There is also now a search bar in the Queries pane, making it easier to find your searches.

Switched to the Windows version of Excel, many of the new additions are exclusive to Insiders. The only change available to everyone, aside from the image feature, is a new hotkey (Alt + F12 or Option + F12 on Mac) to open the Power Query editor.

Source: xda-developers