Spreadsheet Intelligence

At Microsoft Research Asia, this is the umbrella research project behind Ideas in Excel of Microsoft Office 365 product. With successful technology transfers via close collaboration with Excel teams, this intelligent feature has been announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference and released with General Availability on March 1, 2019.

There are following sub- or related research projects on some fundamental technology pillars, respectively. They jointly enable such one-click intelligence of Ideas in Excel.

• TableSense: table range detection and table inner structure extraction from spreadsheet
• Semantic metadata recognition of table data with language expandability
• Auto Insights: automatic insights recommendation for multi-dimensional data

We also have been in long-term collaborations with academia to keep advancing the SOTA in related areas, such as end-user programming using spreadsheet.