At Ignite yesterday, Microsoft announced a whole lot of new products and services. And amongst all the big news, there was a small announcement about Excel that caught my eye: Excel is getting language queries. Yep.

You will no longer need to write complicated formulas every time you want to query something. And although Excel is known for its formulas and all the amazing things you can do with those formulas, novice Excel users will probably appreciate this new feature quite a lot.

The feature will be available as part of Ideas in Excel and allows users to ask questions about their data without writing the complex formulas. You can simply ask things like “What was the sum of sales from last month” for example. Excel will also provide its answers with charts, or pivot tables that you can insert directly into your spreadsheet.

It’s first launching in English for Windows, Mac, and Excel for the web, but Microsoft plans to expand to other languages in the future.

Tagged with Excel, Microsoft Excel