Microsoft is mixing artificial intelligence, Office 365, and your smartphone's camera to create Excel spreadsheets from visual data. The new feature is currently in testing, with a beta version rolling out to a small number of users.
In theory, this would allow users to take a photo of the data they want to pass into Excel, such as a recipe written on paper. Microsoft's AI code would take the input and provide a functional Excel spreadsheet of the image data. Think of it as OCR but for columns and rows. Here's how Microsoft describes it in a blog post:
Open Excel on your phone or tablet and tap the Import data from image button to get started.
Then, position your phone's camera over the data you want to pass into Excel until you see it surrounded by a red border, then press the capture button. If necessary, you can use the sizing options around the edges of the image to crop just the part you want to use.
Excel's powerful AI engine will process the image and convert it into an Excel sheet. When it first imports your data, it will give you the opportunity to fix any issues that arose during the conversion process.
On its own, it's not an impressive feature. However, it's another addition to Microsoft's mobile-first ideas. This isn't an easy task. Scanning for a grid or outline can be done by many apps (including Microsoft's Office Lens), but taking visual data and creating an Excel spreadsheet is the "simple magic" that smartphone users love.
The company is rolling out this feature to its Office 365 package, which it attributes as a key source of revenue and customer engagement.
Finally, while this feature is still in beta for a limited number of Android users, you can be sure that when it does become fully available, it will be cross-platform. This will allow Microsoft to continue to emphasize that the platform is not necessarily the operating system, but the software you choose to run. The software will run on any device regardless of the underlying operating system.
