Microsoft working to bring natural language, speech input to Excel

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Microsoft researchers are working on a new, future Excel feature that combines natural language and automatic programming technologies to make queries and data analysis easier.

If you liked Flash Fill for Excel 2013, you're going to love Analyze for Excel. And if you're an Excel user who hasn't heard of either, read on.

Flash Fill is a feature baked into Excel 2013 that enables Excel to fill in information based on examples of what a user wants. As explained in a recent Microsoft Research write up, a user could type a correctly formatted example of names or numbers and FlashFill will automatically fill in the rows below the example with the same formatting. (Microsoft Research and the Office 2013 team worked together on the Flash Fill feature.)

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Microsoft working to bring natural language, speech input to Excel | ZDNet