Microsoft is introducing a really useful feature for Excel on mobile devices. The company is rolling out a new update to the Excel app for Android that makes it really easy to capture data.

If you ever had to manually enter data from a paper in real life into your spreadsheets, you are going to love this. Excel now lets you take pictures of a document/paper in real life, crop the picture, and turn that into an actual, editable data on Excel. After capturing the data, you can edit the data to make sure Excel’s image recognition is 100% accurate, and make any changes if some of the scanned data were incorrect.

Data entry just became easier! You can now take a picture of a printed data table and automatically convert it into a fully editable @msExcel spreadsheet. Rolling out to #Android users and coming soon to #iOS! Learn more: https://t.co/MLEsEidGA4 pic.twitter.com/4Bi3ulDLPx — Microsoft Office News (@OfficeNews) February 28, 2019

The feature seems really useful, and it’s just one of the ways Microsoft has been pushing Office apps recently. The company’s continued focus on AI has really helped apps like Excel get better and better when it could just continue to be that one boring spreadsheet app. Microsoft can easily bring similar features powered by image recognition and AI to other Office apps as well, so this is probably just the beginning.

The company plans to bring the feature to iOS in the near future.

Tagged with AI, Microsoft Excel, office, Office 365