Hi, Office Insiders. I’m Stacy Molitor, a Program Manager on the Excel team. I’m excited to share that auto detecting data types is now available in Excel.
Auto detecting data types
Data types like stocks and geography have been available for a while, but most people aren’t aware of their existence. We’re here to fix that! Letting people know when they have data in their workbook that could be enhanced by data types will help users pull in external data to enhance the data they’re analyzing.
How it works
- Type in several geographic locations or stock ticker symbols. Put them in separate cells in a column. For example, “Seattle”, “Spokane”, “Redmond” or “MSFT”, “ADBE”, “GOOG.”
- Click Convert to Geography or Convert to Stocks that appears to the right of the selected cell.
Help improve auto detect
If you get the on-object UI for data that doesn’t match the category of the data in your workbook, please submit feedback so that we can fix the problem.
Requirements
Auto detecting in Excel is only available right now when an English input language is installed.
Availability
This feature is available to Current Channel (Preview) users who are running Version 1911 Build 11326.10000.
We typically release features over some time to ensure that things are working smoothly. This is true for Insiders as well. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as Insiders, have had the opportunity to try them.
Feedback
If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can submit them by clicking Help > Feedback.
Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right people. We are excited to hear from you! Sign up for the Office Insider newsletter, and you’ll get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month.