During the last years Microsoft has been working so that Excel, an archaic tool, although very practical is updated. Every company in the world uses Excel to visualize data and apply calculations due to its maturity and its relative ease of use for people who are familiar with the application. For some time, Microsoft has also offered a web version of Excel that can be used anywhere. The company regularly updates it with new features, and now plans to add a couple of more than welcome additions to Excel on the web.
Excel on the web adds two new features
Currently, if you type a calculation formula in the formula bar, a kind of help element appears that list the arguments of the function you are using. You can click the arguments or the name of the function to bring up an area of “Help” dedicated on the right side of your window. We can see this in the image below.
To streamline the experience and minimize errors and searches, Microsoft is introducing a «Assistance for Formulas» which will become visible automatically while writing a formula. This will provide us with the description of the formula and its associated arguments, as well as supporting examples.
The idea is offer us this view directly without having to open external resources, as is the case in the current implementation. We have no information on what this card UI will look like. But the good news is that even if you don’t like it or it takes up too much space, you can crash the card. Being able to simply revert to the current tooltip implementation. This preference will also be saved.
Another minor but useful change that Microsoft is making that excel formula bar is becoming multiline, in the sense that we can manually resize it to your liking. This will be especially useful when we write a long formula and want to format it to be more readable in the formula bar. This capability is already available in the desktop version of Excel.