Microsoft has released five free Bing apps for Office 365 Home Premium subscribers which let them import search and mapping data from the web to applications like Excel.

The five apps include Maps for Excel, Finance for Excel, Image Search for Word, News Search for Word and Dictionary for Excel and Word.

The idea is to improve productivity by allowing users to pull data and the Bing app's interface into an Office application, where data can then be manipulated locally and refreshed within the application.

Bing Maps for Excel, for example, lets users plot location data from a column on to a Bing Map and provides basic data visualisation, either with different-sized circles for single columns and circles or pie charts for multiple columns.

Bing Finance can be used to build a finance portfolio in an Excel table, which can be refreshed with current prices.

By clicking on the "insert plus" icon in Word, users can search Bing News and insert results and videos within the document, while Image Search for Work allows users to drag images from the web into a Word document. Results for both are a panel to the right of the document.

Bing's English language Dictionary meanwhile cuts out the need to switch between browser and document to check spellings and definitions.