Microsoft showed "smart" Excel - "formulas" can be set in "ordinary" language

Resource MSFT Kitchen published a video from Microsoft TechFest, which demonstrates the work of the Project Analyze project of the Microsoft Research division. The essence of the project lies in the fact that working with the Excel spreadsheet processor is not done by entering formulas and clicking on cells, but with the help of commands that are similar to natural English.

Starting from the first minute of the video (about 8 minutes in total), a financial document with ready data is shown as an example, in which you need to get another field, adding the last two - Base pay and Of pay . The usual steps are to place the cursor in the desired cell, enter the formula in it and “drag” it to the desired range. Instead, the " add the base pay and of pay " command is entered in the formula field and, as a result, Excel fills the field by adding the cell values ​​specified in the "formula" in the specified columns. Approximately the sum is also located - with the command " add up ".

The following shows the work of commands in which the foreach is easily guessed or some kind of WHERE in SQL (generally very similar to SQL), which, in principle, makes the examples shown not quite impressive. However, it turns out the system can be asked and not quite the "standard" question " who has a pay larger than average" (in the end, Excel highlights the required fields), which is more similar to ordinary speech and looks more impressive. Unfortunately, this “natural” questions are no longer shown, so that further features of the system can only be guessed at. However, it is likely that future versions of Excel (in Office 16) will have some semblance of “natural language formulas” or perhaps some kind of voice control, which in the light of projects like Siri already looks quite real.

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