Here's how it works. E-mail us. Simply click the data type that you want to use, and Excel should begin treating the selected cell's contents as data. That means that if you were to type the word "pizza" into a cell, reference cells might be automatically populated with related statistics such as the calorie count or the number of carbs found in a slice of pizza. Questions? Microsoft has not yet said what all of those new data types will be, but it did confirm that one of the data types will be food. Just pick the statistic that you want to add and Excel does the rest, as shown in the figure below. Problems?

Right now, Excel sees the words "South Carolina" as raw text. Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps went down for some users on Wednesday night, lasting maybe six hours. To leverage Excel's new capabilities, we have to tell Excel to treat the cell as data rather than text. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.

Suddenly and automatically applying data types to cells in older spreadsheets could produce unpredictable results. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. If you missed it, the idea is that Microsoft is building what I like to think of as data awareness into Excel. The nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday announced that its collaborative work on Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) is now a W3C Recommendation, which is at version 1.0. In doing so, Microsoft has enabled Excel to now recognize data related to stocks and geography. This will make it possible for Excel to provide additional information related to what was previously a static text field. Microsoft and database maker Oracle announced on Wednesday that their joint Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure is now generally available. The point is that when a user enters words into a spreadsheet, Excel will be able to check if the word corresponds to a known data type, and then provide supplementary data without the user having to manually acquire that data. Microsoft has started to roll out a new feature that promises to turn Excel into a much more valuable data-surfacing tool than ever before. In this figure, you will notice a map icon just to the left of the words "South Carolina." Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. You will also notice that when the cell is selected, an Insert Data icon appears to the right of the data. While I don't know the official answer to that question, I can think of a few reasons why automatic text recognition would be a bad idea: In any case, it's best to identify data types manually to prevent confusion. Some of you may be wondering why Microsoft chose to implement its new data types this way, as opposed to having Excel just automatically assign a data type based on a cell's contents. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Excel is eventually going to recognize over 100 new data types. These fields can be used to display anything from population statistics to the state flag.

Microsoft Touts HyperClear Protection Against RETbleed and Other New Side-Channel Attacks, Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure Now Available, Microsoft Teams Gets Much-Needed Audio and Video Quality Improvements, Decentralized Identifiers Finalized as W3C Recommendation, Microsoft Unveils AI Powered Contact Center Powered by Its Nuance Tech, Summer 2022: Grid Report for Security Awareness Training, Summer 2022: Grid Report for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Software, Migrate Your Oracle Workload to Azure With No Risk and Almost Zero Downtime, Ransomware: Building Secure Backup as your last line of Defense, Coffee Talk: Security & Containers: Understanding How It All Ties Together for Enterprises, No Future Without SaaS: How Metallic DMaaS Drives Your Transformation, Microsoft Inspire 2022 Round-Up: Hot News & What You Missed, Coffee Talk: Microsoft 365 Backup & Recovery Best Practices. The reason I wanted to revisit this topic is that Microsoft has begun the update process that will enable Excel to work with new data types. Fortunately, this is easier than it sounds. For example, I have a close friend whose daughter is named Madison. They look exactly the same as any other text entry that you might type into Excel. Brien Posey is a 21-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. A piece of data could fall into multiple categories. If Excel automatically identified data types, Madison's name could be incorrectly identified as a city in Wisconsin, or perhaps as a historical figure. This icon indicates that Excel is now treating the cell's contents as geographic data. Microsoft announced on Tuesday that its HyperClear technology used with its Hyper-V hypervisor offers protections against new speculative execution side-channel attack methods that were disclosed last week by AMD and Intel. So with that said, take a look at Figure 3. If you look at Figure 1, you can see that Excel does not initially do anything special with the words that I typed.

Say goodbye to annoying echoes during your next Teams meeting. Feedback? If Excel encountered such an entry, it might be hard-pressed to figure out if it should be interpreted as being geography- or stock-related. To get Excel to treat text as a recognized data type, just select the cell (or cells if you have more than one cell to convert) and go to the Data tab. A few months ago, I wrote about the extensive work that Microsoft was doing around expanded data types for Excel. When you click on this icon, Excel displays numerous fields that can be inserted into the next cell. Please type the letters/numbers you see above. As such, I wanted to show you how Excel's new data intelligence works. Since one of the new data types is geography, I am going to open Excel and type the name of the state where I live (South Carolina). I can think of a few publicly traded companies whose names could be mistaken for geographic places. Right now, the only available data types are Stocks and Geography, but others will be added later. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. If you look at Figure 2, you can see that the Data tab's toolbar now contains a Data Types section. A cell's contents could be recognized as being something that it is not.