Your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets may soon become more dynamic than ever thanks to a potentially huge breakthrough from the company.
A new update to Excel will allow spreadsheet software to insert images directly into a cell, making them part of a worksheet for the first time, instead of simply floating on top of the sheet.
Microsoft says this new feature should make Excel worksheets more personal and customizable, giving your work a whole new dimension.
Microsoft Excel images
In his post on official Microsoft 365 roadmap (opens in a new tab)the company notes that in addition to directly inserting images into cells, the new “IMAGE” feature will provide users with a number of additional customization options.
Users will be able to move and resize cells, sort and filter, and even work with images in an Excel table.
It’s unclear how all this will work in practice as the feature is still listed as “in development”. However, the expected general availability date is December 2022, which means we should hear more about how it works soon.
Microsoft says that once launched, the feature will be available to all desktop, web, Mac, and Android users.
What’s new is the latest update to Microsoft Excel, which aims to make the software more attractive and user-friendly as it encourages more online collaboration between teams in the era of hybrid work.
Recently, the company announced that it will introduce “@mentions” in Excel to make collaboration on spreadsheets smoother than ever.
@mentions allow users to tag colleagues or collaborators, both within and outside the organization. These tags can be requests to edit, add more information, or simply clarify a specific point, but they can also be used to create, assign, and track tasks in a workbook.
The company also recently introduced the ability to add hyperlinks to comments added to spreadsheets, instead of copying and pasting plain text as was the case before.