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Microsoft has announced<\/a> it\u2019s making Excel\u2019s autocomplete even smarter, at least in the web version that comes with Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365<\/a>). Last week it announced formula suggestions and formula by example, both of which may help automate some things that you had to do manually.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Formula suggestions are pretty much what they say on the tin: if you type the equal sign into a cell, Excel for web will try to intelligently suggest what type of formula you should be using, given the data that\u2019s around it. For example, if you have a full of quarterly sales numbers and a column at the end labeled \u201ctotal,\u201d Excel might suggest summing the range of cells. According to a blog post from Microsoft<\/a>, the feature currently only works in English, and will suggest sum, average, count, counta, min, and max formulas. It\u2019s not a groundbreaking feature, to be sure \u2014 Google Sheets has had something similar for a while<\/a>, and Excel\u2019s AutoSum<\/a> has long been a quick way to apply formulas to data \u2014 but for some use cases, it could be a nice timesaver.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then there\u2019s Formula by Example, which is similar to the Flash Fill feature<\/a> that can automatically detect patterns in data and fill out the rest of a column. The feature is a bit hard to explain succinctly, but this video from Microsoft gives you an idea of what it\u2019s about; detecting a pattern where you\u2019re combing information from cells and then automatically generating a formula that will save you some typing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I tried to test out formula suggestions and formula by example on the web but couldn\u2019t actually get it to show up. The blog post does say that the features are now rolling out, though, so it\u2019s possible they just haven\u2019t made it to my account. For what it\u2019s worth, I also checked the Excel desktop app for Windows and Mac, and they also didn\u2019t seem to have the autocomplete features.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Microsoft\u2019s blog post also includes several other feature announcements, though I\u2019ll admit I\u2019m not enough of a power user to really understand them \u2014 I\u2019ll leave that to esports competitors like the field of the recently-concluded Microsoft Excel World Championship 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a function for adding images with alt-text into your tables coming to Windows, Mac, and web, and the company\u2019s also adding nested Power Query data types and the ability to get data from dynamic arrays to the Insider version of the Windows app for testing. One other potentially useful (and thankfully easy to understand) feature coming to the web is \u201csuggested links,\u201d which will automatically help you fix broken links to other workbooks stored in the cloud. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n