When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Microsoft 365 Word gets SharePoint eSignature, now you can ditch third-party signing tools Paul Hill Neowin @ziks_99 · Jun 6, 2025 03:02 EDT Microsoft has just announced that it will be rolling out an extremely convenient feature for Microsoft 365 customers who use Word throughout this year. The Redmond giant said that you’ll now be able to use SharePoint’s native eSignature service directly in Microsoft Word. The new feature allows customers to request electronic signatures without converting the documents to a PDF or leaving the Word interface, significantly speeding up workflows. Microsoft’s integration of eSignatures also allows you to create eSignature templates which will speed up document approvals, eliminate physical signing steps, and help with compliance and security in the Microsoft 365 environment. This change has the potential to significantly improve the quality-of-life for those in work finding themselves adding lots of signatures to documents as they will no longer have to export PDFs from Word and apply the signature outside of Word. It’s also key to point out that this feature is integrated natively and is not an extension. The move is quite clever from Microsoft, if businesses were using third-party tools to sign their documents, they would no longer need to use these as it’s easier to do it in Word. Not only does it reduce reliance on other tools, it also makes Microsoft’s products more competitive against other office suites such as Google Workspace. Streamlined, secure, and compliant The new eSignature feature is tightly integrated into Word. It lets you insert signature fields seamlessly into documents and request other people’s signatures, all while remaining in Word. The eSignature feature can be accessed in Word by going to the Insert ribbon. When you send a signature request to someone from Word, the recipient will get an automatically generated PDF copy of the Word document to sign. The signed PDF will then be kept in the same SharePoint location as the original Word file. To ensure end-to-end security and compliance, the document never leaves the Microsoft 365 trust boundary. For anyone with a repetitive signing process, this integration allows you to turn Word documents into eSignature templates so they can be reused. Another feature that Microsoft has built in is audit trail and notifications. Both the senders and signers will get email notifications throughout the entire signing process. Additionally, you can view the activity history (audit trail) in the signed PDF to check who signed it and when. Finally, Microsoft said that administrators will be able to control how the feature is used in Word throughout the organization. They can decide to enable it for specific users via an Office group policy or limit it to particular SharePoint sites. The company said that SharePoint eSignature also lets admins log activities in the Purview Audit log. A key security measure included by Microsoft, which was mentioned above, was the Microsoft 365 trust boundary. By keeping documents in this boundary, Microsoft ensures that all organizations can use this feature without worry. The inclusion of automatic PDF creation is all a huge benefit to users as it will cut out the step of manual PDF creation. While creating a PDF isn’t complicated, it can be time consuming. The eSignature feature looks like a win-win-win for organizations that rely on digital signatures. Not only does it speed things along and remain secure, but it’s also packed with features like tracking, making it really useful and comprehensive. When and how your organization gets it SharePoint eSignature has started rolling out to Word on the M365 Beta and Current Channels in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia-Pacific. This phase of the rollout is expected to be completed by early July. People in the rest of the world will also be gaining this time-saving feature but it will not reach everyone right away, though Microsoft promises to reach everybody by the end of the year. To use the feature, it will need to be enabled by administrators. If you’re an admin who needs to enable this, just go to the M365 Admin Center and enable SharePoint eSignature, ensuring the Word checkbox is selected. Once the service is enabled, apply the “Allow the use of SharePoint eSignature for Microsoft Word” policy. The policy can be enabled via Intune, Group Policy manager, or the Cloud Policy service for Microsoft 365 Assuming the admins have given permission to use the feature, users will be able to access SharePoint eSignatures on Word Desktop using the Microsoft 365 Current Channel or Beta Channel. The main caveats include that the rollout is phased, so you might not get it right away, and it requires IT admins to enable the feature - in which case, it may never get enabled at all. Overall, this feature stands to benefit users who sign documents a lot as it can save huge amounts of time cumulatively. It’s also good for Microsoft who increase organizations’ dependence on Word. Tags Report a problem with article Follow @NeowinFeed

Photo Credit: Unsplash/Solen Feyissa Connectors on ChatGPT is not available in European Union countries, China, and the UK Highlights With Record Mode, ChatGPT can transcribe and summarise meetings ChatGPT’s Connector feature works only with Deep Research It is available to all the paid subscribers of ChatGPT Advertisement OpenAI released two new utility features for ChatGPT users on Wednesday. The artificial intelligence (AI) app on MacOS now has a Record Mode that can capture meetings, brainstorming sessions, and voice notes, and transcribe and summarise the main discussion points. This feature is currently only available to the ChatGPT Team subscribers. Additionally, the San Francisco-based AI firm is also introducing Connectors, which is a tool that lets the chatbot connect to the user's internal cloud-based data sources such as Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive, and more.ChatGPT Can Now Record Your MeetingsIn a series of posts on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official handle of OpenAI announced the new ChatGPT features. The company also hosted a live stream on YouTube to provide a demonstration of these business-focused features. Both of these features are exclusive to the company's paid subscribers, however, the Record Mode is only aimed at the Team users. Additionally, Record Mode is not available in the European Economic Area (EEA), China, and the UK.Record Mode is a new capability available on ChatGPT's macOS desktop app. Team users can now tap the new Record button at the bottom of any chat. Once the user has given permission for microphone, the chatbot will begin capturing the meeting. It can also record voice notes. Once the session has ended, it can provide an editable summary of the conversation as well as its recording.OpenAI says users will be able to search for past meetings, references to them during conversations, and bring relevant context. The transcripts of the meetings also get saved as a canvas in the user's chat history. This transcript can also be rewritten as an email, project plans, or code scaffold. Notably, the tool can record up to 120 minutes per session.Separately, the AI firm also released Connectors. The tool allows ChatGPT to connect to third-party internal data sources and retrieve information in real-time. The feature works with Outlook, Teams, Google Drive, Gmail, Linear, and more. The Team, Enterprise, and Edu subscribers can also connect to SharePoint, DropBox, and Box. Connectors will only work when using Deep Research. OpenAI is also letting workspace admins build custom Deep Research Connectors using Model Context Protocol (MCP) in beta. For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Further reading: OpenAI, ChatGPT, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Apps Akash Dutta Akash Dutta is a Senior Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In his free time, he can be seen supporting his favourite football club - Chelsea, watching movies and anime, and sharing passionate opinions on food. More Related Stories

Microsoft has shed light on a previously undocumented cluster of malicious activity originating from a Russia-affiliated threat actor dubbed Void Blizzard (aka Laundry Bear) that it said is attributed to "worldwide cloud abuse." Active since at least April 2024, the hacking group is linked to espionage operations mainly targeting organizations that are important to Russian government objectives, including those in government, defense, transportation, media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and healthcare sectors in Europe and North America. "They often use stolen sign-in details that they likely buy from online marketplaces to gain access to organizations," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report published today. "Once inside, they steal large amounts of emails and files." Attacks mounted by Void Blizzard have been found to disproportionately single out NATO member states and Ukraine, suggesting that the adversary is looking to collect intelligence to further Russian strategic objectives. Specifically, the threat actor is known to target government organizations and law enforcement agencies in NATO member states and countries that provide direct military or humanitarian support to Ukraine. It's also said to have staged successful attacks aimed at education, transportation, and defense verticals in Ukraine. This includes the October 2024 compromise of several user accounts belonging to a Ukrainian aviation organization that had been previously targeted by Seashell Blizzard, a threat actor tied to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), in 2022. The attacks are characterized as opportunistic and targeted high-volume efforts that are engineered to breach targets deemed of value to the Russian government. Initial access methods comprise unsophisticated techniques like password spraying and stolen authentication credentials. In some of the campaigns, the threat actor has utilized stolen credentials likely sourced from commodity information stealer logs available on the cybercrime underground to access Exchange and SharePoint Online and harvest email and files from compromised organizations. "The threat actor has also in some cases enumerated the compromised organization's Microsoft Entra ID configuration using the publicly available AzureHound tool to gain information about the users, roles, groups, applications, and devices belonging to that tenant," Microsoft said. As recently as last month, the Windows maker said it observed the hacking crew shifting to "more direct methods" to steal passwords, such as sending spear-phishing emails that are engineered to trick victims into parting with their login information by means of an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) landing pages. The activity entails the use of a typosquatted domain to impersonate the Microsoft Entra authentication portal to target over 20 NGOs in Europe and the United States. The email messages claimed to be from an organizer from the European Defense and Security Summit and contained a PDF attachment with fake invitations to the summit. Present wishing the PDF document is a malicious QR code that redirects to an attacker-controlled domain ("micsrosoftonline[.]com") that hosts a credential phishing page. It's believed that the phishing page is based on the open-source Evilginx phishing kit. Post-compromise actions after gaining initial access encompass the abuse of Exchange Online and Microsoft Graph to enumerate users' mailboxes and cloud-hosted files, and then make use of automation to facilitate bulk data collection. In select instances, the threat actors are also said to have accessed Microsoft Teams conversations and messages via the web client application. "Many of the compromised organizations overlap with past – or, in some cases, concurrent – targeting by other well-known Russian state actors, including Forest Blizzard, Midnight Blizzard, and Secret Blizzard," Microsoft said. "This intersection suggests shared espionage and intelligence collection interests assigned to the parent organizations of these threat actors." Void Blizzard Linked to September Breach of Dutch Police Agency In a separate advisory, the Netherlands Defence Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) attributed Void Blizzard to a September 23, 2024, breach of a Dutch police employee account via a pass-the-cookie attack, stating work-related contact information of police employees was obtained by the threat actor. Pass-the-cookie attack refers to a scenario where an attacker uses stolen cookies obtained via information stealer malware to sign in to accounts without having to enter a username and password. It's currently not known what other information was stolen, although it's highly likely that other Dutch organisations were also targeted. "Laundry Bear is looking for information about the purchase and production of military equipment by Western governments and Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine," said MIVD director, Vice Admiral Peter Reesink, in a statement. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

Windows may get all the attention, but when you want to get real work done, you turn to the applications that run on it. And if you use spreadsheets, that generally means Excel. Excel is, of course, part of Microsoft’s Office suite of productivity tools. Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee. When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2021 or Office 2024 — its applications will never get new features, whereas Microsoft 365 apps are continually updated with new features. For more details, see our in-depth comparison of the two Office models. This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the features that have been introduced or changed in Microsoft 365’s Excel for Windows desktop client over the past few years. (If you’re looking for Excel tips for the perpetual-license Office suite, see our Office 2021 and 2024 cheat sheet.) We’ll periodically update this story as new features roll out. In this article Use the Ribbon Search to get tasks done quickly Explore Excel’s advanced chart types Collaborate in real time Take advantage of linked data Make your own custom views of a worksheet Create dynamic arrays and charts Use AutoSave to provide a safety net as you work Review or restore earlier versions of a spreadsheet Try out Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel — but don’t expect too much Other new features to check out Use keyboard shortcuts Use the Ribbon The Ribbon interface, which puts commonly used commands in a tabbed toolbar running across the top of the application window, is alive and well in the current version of Excel. Microsoft has tweaked the Ribbon’s looks numerous times over the years, but it still works the same way it always has: just click one of the Ribbon’s tabs to see related commands on the toolbar. For example, click Insert to find buttons for inserting tables, PivotTables, charts, and more. Through the years, Excel’s Ribbon has gotten a variety of cosmetic changes, but it still works largely the way it always has. Preston Gralla / Foundry Just as in previous versions of Excel, if you want the Ribbon commands to go away, press Ctrl-F1 or click the name of the tab you’re currently on. (The tabs above the Ribbon — File, Home, Insert, and so on — stay visible.) To make the commands reappear, press Ctrl-F1 again or click any tab name. You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon display options icon (a down arrow) on the bottom of the Ribbon at the far right, just below the Share button. A drop-down menu appears with these four options: Full-screen mode: This makes Excel take up your entire screen and hides the Ribbon. To get out of full-screen mode, click the three-dot icon at the upper right of the screen. Show tabs only: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display options down arrow and select Always show Ribbon. Always show Ribbon: This displays the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them. Show/Hide Quick Access toolbar: This displays or hides the Quick Access toolbar, which gives you fast access to Excel commands you want to have available no matter which tab you’re on. When you enable the toolbar, it starts off empty. To populate it, click a small down arrow that appears at the right of the toolbar and from the drop-down menu that appears, choose which features to put on it. If you don’t see a command you want, click More Commands. Find the command you want on the left and click Add. You can have the toolbar appear either at the top of the screen, just to the right of the AutoSave button, or just underneath the Ribbon. To move it from one place to another, click a small down arrow that appears at the right of the toolbar and from the drop-down menu that appears, select either Show below the Ribbon or Show above the Ribbon.  Microsoft has for many years teased a simplified version of the Ribbon that hides most of the commands to reduce clutter. That simplified Ribbon is available in the Excel web app, but there’s currently no sign that it will appear in the Excel desktop app. There’s a useful feature in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click the File tab on the Ribbon. If you click Open or Save a Copy from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you’ve connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You’ll be able to see at a glance which is which. Click the Add a service dropdown to add another cloud storage account. Preston Gralla / Foundry Search to get tasks done quickly Excel has never been the most user-friendly of applications, and it has so many powerful features it can be tough to keep track of them all. That’s where the handy Search feature comes in. To use it, click in the Search box — it’s above the Ribbon in the green title area. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q.) Then type in a task you want to do. If you want to summarize your spreadsheet data using a PivotTable, for example, type in something like summarize with pivot table. You’ll get a menu showing potential matches for the task. In this instance, the top result is a direct link to the form for summarizing with a PivotTable — select it and you’ll start your task right away, without having to go to the Ribbon’s Insert tab first. The search box makes it easy to perform just about any task in Excel. Preston Gralla / Foundry If you’d like more information about your task, the final items that appear in the menu let you select from related Help topics. Even if you consider yourself a spreadsheet jockey, it’s worth your while to try out the enhanced search function. It’s a big time-saver, and far more efficient than hunting through the Ribbon to find a command. Also useful is that it remembers the features you’ve previously clicked on in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you’ve searched for. That makes sure that tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach. And it puts tasks you rarely do within easy reach as well. Users of enterprise and education editions of Microsoft 365 can also use the Search box to find people in their organization, SharePoint resources, and other personalized results from within Excel. (See the Microsoft Search support page for more details about all it can do.) Explore Excel’s advanced chart types Charts are great for visualizing and presenting spreadsheet data, and for gaining insights from it. To that end, Microsoft has introduced a number of advanced chart types over the past several years, including most notably a histogram (frequently used in statistics), a “waterfall” that’s effective at showing running financial totals, and a hierarchical treemap that helps you find patterns in data. Note that the new charts are available only if you’re working in an .xlsx document. If you use the older .xls format, you won’t find them. To see all the charts, put your cursor in a cell or group of cells that contains data, select Insert > Recommended Charts and click the All Charts tab. You’ll find the newer charts, mixed in with the older ones. Select any to create the chart. (For help using charts, see our guide to charts and sparklines in Excel.) Excel includes several advanced chart types, including waterfall. Preston Gralla / Foundry These are the new chart types: Treemap. This chart type creates a hierarchical view of your data, with top-level categories (or tree branches) shown as rectangles, and with subcategories (or sub-branches) shown as smaller rectangles grouped inside the larger ones. Thus, you can easily compare the sizes of top-level categories and subcategories in a single view. For instance, a bookstore can see at a glance that it brings in more revenue from 1st Readers, a subcategory of Children’s Books, than for the entire Non-fiction top-level category. srcset="https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?quality=50&strip=all 830w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=300%2C191&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=768%2C489&quality=50&strip=all 768w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=264%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 264w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=132%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 132w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=753%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 753w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=565%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 565w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel2016_chart_treemap.jpg?resize=392%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 392w" width="830" height="529" sizes="(max-width: 830px) 100vw, 830px">A treemap chart lets you easily compare top-level categories and subcategories in a single view. Preston Gralla / Foundry Sunburst. This chart type also displays hierarchical data, but in a multi-level pie chart. Each level of the hierarchy is represented by a circle. The innermost circle contains the top-level categories, the next circle out shows subcategories, the circle after that subsubcategories and so on. Sunbursts are best for showing the relationships among categories and subcategories, while treemaps are better at showing the relative sizes of categories and subcategories. A sunburst chart shows hierarchical data such as book categories and subcategories as a multi-level pie chart. Preston Gralla / Foundry Waterfall. This chart type is well-suited for visualizing financial statements. It displays a running total of the positive and negative contributions toward a final net value. A waterfall chart shows a running total of positive and negative contributions, such as revenue and expenses, toward a final net value. Preston Gralla / Foundry Histogram. This kind of chart shows frequencies within a data set. It could, for example, show the number of books sold in specific price ranges in a bookstore. Histograms are good for showing frequencies, such as number of books sold at various price points. Preston Gralla / Foundry Pareto. This chart, also known as a sorted histogram, contains bars as well as a line graph. Values are represented in descending order by bars. The cumulative total percentage of each bar is represented by a rising line. In the bookstore example, each bar could show a reason for a book being returned (defective, priced incorrectly, and so on). The chart would show, at a glance, the primary reasons for returns, so a bookstore owner could focus on those issues. Note that the Pareto chart does not show up when you select Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts. To use it, first select the data you want to chart, then select Insert > Insert Statistic Chart, and under Histogram, choose Pareto. In a Pareto chart, or sorted histogram, a rising line represents the cumulative total percentage of the items being measured. In this example, it’s easy to see that more than 80% of a bookstore’s returns are attributable to three problems. Preston Gralla / Foundry Box & Whisker. This chart, like a histogram, shows frequencies within a data set but provides for a deeper analysis than a histogram. For example, in a bookstore it could show the distribution of prices of different genres of books. In the example shown here, each “box” represents the first to third quartile of prices for books in that genre, while the “whiskers” (the lines extending up and down from the box) show the upper and lower range of prices. Outliers that are priced outside the whiskers are shown as dots, the median price for each genre is shown with a horizontal line across the box, and the mean price is shown with an x. Box & Whisker charts can show details about data ranges such as the first to third quartile in the “boxes,” median and mean inside the boxes, upper and lower range with the “whiskers,” and outliers with dots.Preston Gralla / Foundry Funnel. This chart type is useful when you want to display values at multiple stages in a process. A funnel chart can show the number of sales prospects at every stage of a sales process, for example, with prospects at the top for the first stage, qualified prospects underneath it for the second stage, and so on, until you get to the final stage, closed sales. Generally, the values in funnel charts decrease with each stage, so the bars in the chart look like a funnel. Funnel charts let you display values at multiple stages in a process. Preston Gralla / Foundry When creating the data for a funnel chart, use one column for the stages in the process you’re charting, and a second column for the values for each stage. Once you’ve done that, to create the chart, select the data, then select Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts > Funnel. Map. Map charts do exactly what you think they should: They let you compare data across different geographical regions, such as countries, regions, states, counties, or postal codes. Excel will automatically recognize the regions and create a map that visualizes the data. You can compare data across different locations with a map chart. Preston Gralla / Foundry To create a map chart, select the data you want to chart, then select Insert > Maps, then select the map chart. Note that in some instances, Excel might have a problem creating the map — for example, if there are multiple locations with the same name as one that you’re mapping. If that occurs, you’ll have to add one or more columns with details about the locations. If, say, you’re charting towns in the United Kingdom, you would have to include columns for the county and country each town is located in. Collaborate in real time For those who frequently collaborate with others, a welcome feature in Excel for Microsoft 365 is real-time collaboration that lets people work on spreadsheets together from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Microsoft calls this “co-authoring.” Note that in order to use co-authoring, the spreadsheet must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online, and you must be logged into your Microsoft 365 account. Also, co-authoring works in Excel only if you have AutoSave turned on. To do it, choose the On option on the AutoSave slider at the top left of the screen. To share a spreadsheet so you can collaborate on it with others: first open it, then click the Share button on the upper-right of the Excel screen. The “Send link” window pops up. Here you can send an email with a link where others can access the spreadsheet. Use the “Send link” pane to share a document and the “Link settings” pane to fine-tune its access permissions. Preston Gralla / Foundry Enter the email address of the person with whom you want to share in the text box. Enter multiple addresses, separated by commas, if you want to share the workbook with multiple people. One feature I found particularly useful when adding email addresses: As you type, Excel looks through your corporate or personal address book and lists the names and addresses of contacts who match the text you’ve input. Click the address you want to add. This not only saves you a bit of time but helps make sure you don’t incorrectly type in addresses. Next, decide whether anyone with the link can access the file, or only those whose email addresses you enter. If you see the text “Anyone with the link can edit” near the top of the pane, you can change that by clicking it, then choosing Specific people on the screen that appears. Similarly, if “Specific people” appears above the email addresses, you can change that by clicking it, then choosing Anyone with the link can edit from the screen that appears. (If you use a business, enterprise, or education edition of Office, your IT department may have set up different sharing permissions on these two screens, such as an option to allow anyone within your organization to edit the document. You may also need to click a Link settings button — a gear icon — to access the “Link settings” pane.) On this second screen you can also set the document to read-only for everybody, or allow everybody to edit it. In the “Other settings” section, click the down arrow and choose either Can edit, which allows full editing, or Can view, which is read-only. If you want to give certain people editing privileges and others view-only privileges, you can send two separate invitations with different rights selected. On this screen you can also set an expiration date after which people won’t be able to access the file, and you can set a password so that only people who have the password can access it. When you’ve made your selections, click Apply. Back in the main “Send link” screen, you can send a message along with the link by typing it into the Message box. Then click Send. An email is sent to all the recipients with a link they can click to open the document. Your collaborators will get an email like this when you share a spreadsheet. Preston Gralla / Foundry (If you’d rather send recipients a copy of the file as an Excel file instead of a link, and thus not allow real-time collaboration, click Send a copy at the bottom of the “Send link” screen.) There’s another way to share a file stored in a personal OneDrive for collaboration: In the “Copy link” area at the bottom of the “Send link” pane, click Copy. When you do that, you can copy the link and send it to someone yourself via email. Note that you have the same options for setting access and editing permissions as you do if you have Excel send the link directly for you. Just click Anyone with the link can edit or Specific people below “Copy link,” and follow the instructions above. To begin collaborating: When your recipients receive the email and click to open the spreadsheet, they’ll open it in the web version of Excel in a browser, not in the desktop version of Excel. If you’ve granted them edit permissions, they can begin editing immediately in the browser or else click Editing > Open in Desktop App on the upper right of the screen to work in the Excel desktop client. Excel for the web is less powerful and polished than the desktop client, but it works well enough for real-time collaboration. As soon as any collaborators open the file, you’ll see a colored cursor that indicates their presence in the file. Each person collaborating gets a different color. Hover your cursor over a colored cell that indicates someone’s presence, and you’ll see their name. Once they begin editing the workbook, such as entering data or a formula into a cell, creating a chart, and so on, you see the changes they make in real time. Your cursor also shows up on their screen as a color, and they see the changes you make. You can easily see where collaborators are working in a shared worksheet. Preston Gralla / Foundry Collaboration includes the ability to make comments in a file, inside individual cells, without actually changing the contents of the cell. To do it, right-click a cell, select New Comment and type in your comment. Everyone collaborating can see that a cell has a comment in it — it’s indicated by a small colored notch appearing in the upper right of the cell. The color matches the person’s collaboration color. To see someone’s comment in a cell, hover your cursor over the cell or put your cursor in the cell and you’ll see the comment, the name of the person who made the comment, and a Reply box you can use to send a reply. You can also click the Comments button on the upper right of the screen to open the Comments pane, which lists every comment by every person. Click any comment to jump to the cell it’s in. You can also reply when you click a comment in the pane. You can make see comments that other people make, and make comments yourself. Preston Gralla / Foundry Take advantage of linked data Excel for Microsoft 365 has a feature that Microsoft calls “linked data types.” Essentially, they’re cells that are connected to an online source (Bing) that automatically updates their information — for example, a company’s current stock price. As I write this, there are nearly approximately 100 linked data types, including not just obvious data types such as stocks, geography, and currencies, but many others, including chemistry, cities, anatomy, food, yoga, and more. To use them, type the items you want to track into cells in a single column. For stocks, for example, you can type in a series of stock ticker symbols, company names, fund names, etc. After that, select the cells, then on the Ribbon’s Data tab, select Stocks in the Data Types section in the middle. (If you had typed in geographic names such as countries, states, or cities, you would instead select Geography.) Excel automatically converts the text in each cell into the matching data source — in our example, into the company name and stock ticker. Excel also adds a small icon to the left edge of each cell identifying it as a linked cell. Click any icon and a data card will pop up showing all sorts of information about the kind of information you’ve typed in.  For instance, a stock data card shows stock-related information such as current price, today’s high and low, and 52-week high and low, as well as general company information including industry and number of employees. A location card shows the location’s population, capital, GDP, and so on. You can build out a table using data from the data card. To do so, select the cells again, and an Insert Data button appears. Click the button, then select the information you want to appear, such as Price for the current stock price, or Population for the population of a geographic region. srcset="https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?quality=50&strip=all 620w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?resize=300%2C293&quality=50&strip=all 300w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?resize=172%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 172w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?resize=86%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 86w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?resize=491%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 491w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?resize=368%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 368w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/excel-microsoft365-15-linked-data-2023.jpg?resize=256%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 256w" width="620" height="606" sizes="(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px">Linked data types let you insert information, such as a company’s high and low stock prices, that is continually updated. Preston Gralla / Foundry Excel will automatically add a column to the right populated with the latest information for each item you’re tracking, and will keep it updated. You can click the Insert Data button multiple times to keep adding columns to the right for different types of data from the item’s data card.  It’s helpful to add column headers so you know what each column is showing. Make your own custom views of a worksheet Sheet Views let you make a copy of a sheet and then apply filtered or sorted views of the data to the new sheet. It’s useful when you’re working with other people on a spreadsheet, and someone wants to create a customized view without altering the original sheet. You can all create multiple custom-filtered/sorted views for a sheet. Once you’ve saved a sheet view, anyone with access to the spreadsheet can see it. Note: To use this feature, your spreadsheet must be stored in OneDrive. Sheet views work best when your data is in table format. Select the data, then go to the Ribbon toolbar and click the Insert tab. Near the left end of the Insert toolbar, click the Table button and then OK. To create a new sheet view, click the Ribbon’s View tab, then click the New button in the Sheet View area at the far left. The row numbers and column letters at the left and top of your spreadsheet turn black to let you know you’re in a new sheet view. In the Sheet View area of the Ribbon, it says Temporary View, the default name given to a new sheet view before you’ve saved it. Here’s a sheet view with data sorted from highest to lowest costs. Preston Gralla / Foundry Now apply whatever sorting and filtering you like to the data. (If you need help, see the “How to sort and filter data” section of our Excel tables guide.) To save this view, click the Keep button in the Sheet View area of the Ribbon. When you do that, it is saved as “View1” by default. You can click View1 and type in a more meaningful name for the view. When you click Exit on this toolbar, you return to your spreadsheet, and the row numbers and columns on the left and top of the spreadsheet are no longer black. To switch from one sheet view to another, click the View tab. At the left of the Ribbon toolbar, click the down arrow next to the name of the current view (it will say Default if you’re viewing the spreadsheet without a sheet view applied) to open a dropdown list of the sheet views created for the spreadsheet. Click the name of a sheet view to switch to it. Whenever you’re looking at a sheet view, the row numbers and column letters framing your spreadsheet remain black to indicate that you’re in a sheet view, not the original spreadsheet. Create dynamic arrays and charts Dynamic arrays let you write formulas that return multiple values based on your data. When data on the spreadsheet is updated, the dynamic arrays automatically update and resize themselves. To create a dynamic array, first create a table as outlined in the previous tip. Make sure to include a column that lists categories. Also put in at least one column to its right that lists corresponding values. Put a header at the top of each column. So, for example, if you’re creating a spreadsheet for a business trip budget, Column A might list expenses, such as plane tickets, meals, hotel, etc., and Column B could list each item’s cost on the same row. Once you’ve set up the table, use a dynamic array function on it, such as FILTER, SORT, or UNIQUE to create a dynamic array next to the table. Here’s an example of a formula for using the FILTER function: =FILTER(A2:B9, B2:B9 < 2000) This tells Excel to show only the items that cost less than $2,000 in the array. The FILTER function created a data array showing only the items with costs below $2,000. Preston Gralla / Foundry Now, whenever the data in your source table changes, the dynamic array updates and resizes itself to accommodate the changes. That means the dynamic array is always up to date. So in our example, if you add new items with values under $2,000 to the table, the dynamic array will enlarge itself and include those new items. In the same way, you can use the SORT function to sort data and the UNIQUE function to remove duplicate data. (Read about more ways to use the FILTER, SORT, and UNIQUE functions from Microsoft support.) You create a dynamic chart from the dynamic array in the same way you do any other Excel chart. Select the cells from the dynamic array that you want to chart, then select the Insert tab and select the type of chart you want to add. When the source data changes in a way that affects the dynamic array that the chart is based on, both the dynamic array and the chart will be updated. Use AutoSave to provide a safety net as you work If you’re worried that you’ll lose your work on a worksheet because you don’t constantly save it, you’ll welcome the AutoSave feature. It automatically saves your files for you, so you won’t have to worry about system crashes, power outages, Excel crashes and similar problems. It only works only on documents stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. It won’t work with files saved in the older .xls format or files you save to your hard drive. AutoSave is a vast improvement over the previous AutoRecover feature built into Excel. AutoRecover doesn’t save your files in real time; instead, every several minutes it saves an AutoRecover file that you can try to recover after a crash. It doesn’t always work, though — for example, if you don’t properly open Excel after the crash, or if the crash doesn’t meet Microsoft’s definition of a crash. In addition, Microsoft notes, “AutoRecover is only effective for unplanned disruptions, such as a power outage or a crash. AutoRecover files are not designed to be saved when a logoff is scheduled or an orderly shutdown occurs.” And the files aren’t saved in real time, so you’ll likely lose several minutes of work even if all goes as planned. AutoSave is turned on by default in Excel for Microsoft 365 .xlsx workbooks stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. To turn it off (or back on again) for a workbook, use the AutoSave slider on the top left of the screen. If you want AutoSave to be off for all files by default, select File > Options > Save and uncheck the box marked AutoSave files stored in the Cloud by default on Excel. Using AutoSave may require some rethinking of your workflow. Many people are used to creating new worksheets based on existing ones by opening the existing file, making changes to it, and then using Save As to save the new version under a different name, leaving the original file intact. Be warned that doing this with AutoSave enabled will save your changes in the original file. Instead, Microsoft suggests opening the original file and immediately selecting File > Save a Copy (which replaces Save As when AutoSave is enabled) to create a new version. If AutoSave does save unwanted changes to a file, you can always use the Version History feature described below to roll back to an earlier version. Review or restore earlier versions of a spreadsheet There’s an extremely useful feature hiding in the title bar in Excel for Microsoft 365: You can use Version History to go back to previous versions of a file, review them, compare them side-by-side with your existing version, and copy and paste from an older file to your existing one. You can also restore an entire old version. To do it, click the file name at the top of the screen in an open file. A drop-down menu appears. Click Version History, and the Version History pane appears on the right side of the screen with a list of the previous versions of the file, including the time and date they were saved. (Alternatively, you can select the File tab on the Ribbon, click Info from the menu on the left, and then click the Version History button.) Use Version History to see all previous versions of a spreadsheet, copy and paste from an older file to your existing one, or restore an entire old version. Preston Gralla / Foundry In the Version History pane, click Open version under any older version, and that version appears as a read-only version in a new window. Scroll through the version and copy any content you want, then paste it into the latest version of the file. To restore the old version, overwriting the current one, click the Restore button. Try out Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel — but don’t expect too much For an additional subscription fee, business users of Excel can use Microsoft’s genAI add-in, Microsoft 365 Copilot. You can have Copilot suggest and create charts, create formulas, mine spreadsheets for data insights you might have missed, and more. If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, many of those features are now bundled with your core subscription. To start using Copilot in Excel, open a spreadsheet and click the Copilot button at the right of the Ribbon’s Home tab. The Copilot panel will appear on the right, offering suggestions for actions it can perform, such as summarizing your data with a chart, adding formulas to the spreadsheet, or applying conditional formatting to the sheet. You can also chat with Copilot in the panel, asking questions about your data or how to perform an action yourself. Note that these suggestions are generic and won’t always make sense. For example, when you start with a blank worksheet and click the Copilot button, its suggestions include summarizing data using pivot tables or charts, even though there’s no data to chart or put into a table. Microsoft 365 Copilot can help you in multiple ways in Excel, including creating formulas and charts, mining spreadsheets for insights, and more. Preston Gralla / Foundry In my testing, I found that Copilot wasn’t particularly helpful. For example, when I asked it to summarize data using a PivotTable or chart, several times it responded, “Something went wrong. Please try again in a moment.” Then it said that I first needed to reformat parts of my spreadsheet by using the Transform() function, and gave confusing advice on how I could do it — it wouldn’t do the task itself. (Eventually, I gave up.) When I asked it to suggest conditional formatting for my spreadsheet, which would highlight important data, it told me which data I should highlight but didn’t explain why the data was important. It also didn’t do the highlighting for me or tell me how to do it. I gave it one more try and asked it to perform an advanced analysis, which it would use Python to do. It certainly did something, although it was unclear what it was. It overwrote my original spreadsheet and added a section that claimed to show annual growth rates for revenue streams. But the data seemed to be incorrect. Perhaps advanced spreadsheet jockeys might be able to make sense of what Copilot is up to whenever they ask it for help. But mere mortal businesspeople may find it of no help at all. In my testing, I found Copilot not at all helpful, although spreadsheet jockeys may be able to make some sense of what it does. Preston Gralla / Foundry What’s more, Microsoft’s focus on Copilot in M365 has reduced the usefulness of Excel in some ways. For example, there used to be a handy feature called Smart Lookup that let you conduct targeted web searches from inside Excel. But at the beginning of 2025, Microsoft removed Smart Lookup from Excel, saying that the feature has been deprecated. Now the only way to search the web from inside Excel is via Copilot, which lacks some features of Smart Lookup — notably the ability to highlight words or phrases in a document and trigger an automatic web search. And M365 Copilot isn’t available to business customers unless they pay the additional subscription fee. Other features to check out Spreadsheet pros will be pleased with several other features and tools that have been added to Excel for Microsoft 365 over the past few years, from a quick data analysis tool to an advanced 3D mapping platform. Get an instant data analysis If you’re looking to analyze data in a spreadsheet, the Quick Analysis tool will help. Highlight the cells you want to analyze, then move your cursor to the lower right-hand corner of what you’ve highlighted. A small icon of a spreadsheet with a lightning bolt on it appears. Click it and you’ll get a variety of tools for performing instant analysis of your data. For example, you can use the tool to highlight the cells with a value greater than a specific number, get the numerical average for the selected cells, or create a chart on the fly. The Quick Analysis feature gives you a variety of tools for analyzing your data instantly. Preston Gralla / Foundry Translate text You can translate text from right within Excel. Highlight the cell whose text you want translated, then select Review > Translate. A Translator pane opens on the right. Excel will detect the words’ language at the top of the pane; you then select the language you want it translated to below. If Excel can’t detect the language of the text you chose or detects it incorrectly, you can override it. Easily find worksheets that have been shared with you It’s easy to forget which worksheets others have shared with you. In Excel for Microsoft 365 there’s an easy way to find them: Select File > Open > Shared with Me to see a list of them all. Note that this only works with OneDrive (both Personal and Business) and SharePoint Online. You’ll also need to be signed into you Microsoft or work or school account. Predict the future with Forecast Sheet Using the Forecast Sheet function, you can generate forecasts built on historical data. If, for example, you have a worksheet showing past book sales by date, Forecast Sheet can predict future sales based on past ones. To use the feature, you must be working in a worksheet that has time-based historical data. Put your cursor in one of the data cells, go to the Data tab on the Ribbon and select Forecast Sheet from the Forecast group toward the right. On the screen that appears, you can select various options such as whether to create a line or bar chart and what date the forecast should end. Click the Create button, and a new worksheet will appear showing your historical and predicted data and the forecast chart. (Your original worksheet will be unchanged.) The Forecast Sheet feature can predict future results based on historical data. Preston Gralla / Foundry Manage data for analysis with Get & Transform This feature is not entirely new to Excel. Formerly known as Power Query, it was made available as a free add-in to Excel 2013 and worked only with the PowerPivot features in Excel Professional Plus. Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence software offers similar functionality. Now called Get & Transform, it’s a business intelligence tool that lets you pull in, combine, and shape data from wide variety of local and cloud sources. These include Excel workbooks, CSV files, SQL Server and other databases, Azure, Active Directory, and many others. You can also use data from public sources including Wikipedia. Get & Transform helps you pull in and shape data from a wide variety of sources. Preston Gralla / Foundry You’ll find the Get & Transform tools together in a group on the Data tab in the Ribbon. For more about using these tools, see Microsoft’s “Getting Started with Get & Transform in Excel.” Make a 3D map Before Excel 2016, Power Map was a popular free 3D geospatial visualization add-in for Excel. Now it’s free, built into Excel for Microsoft 365, and has been renamed 3D Maps. With it, you can plot geographic and other information on a 3D globe or map. You’ll need to first have data suitable for mapping, and then prepare that data for 3D Maps. Those steps are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s advice from Microsoft about how to get and prepare data for 3D Maps. Once you have properly prepared data, open the spreadsheet and select Insert > 3D Map > Open 3D Maps. Then click Enable from the box that appears. That turns on the 3D Maps feature. For details on how to work with your data and customize your map, head to the Microsoft tutorial “Get started with 3D Maps.” If you don’t have data for mapping but just want to see firsthand what a 3D map is like, you can download sample data created by Microsoft. The screenshot shown here is from Microsoft’s Dallas Utilities Seasonal Electricity Consumption Simulation demo. When you’ve downloaded the workbook, open it up, select Insert > 3D Map > Open 3D Maps and click the map to launch it. With 3D Maps you can plot geospatial data in an interactive 3D map. Preston Gralla / Foundry Automate tasks If you have OneDrive for Business and use Excel with a commercial or educational Microsoft 365 license, you can automate tasks with the Automate tab. You’ll be able to create and edit scripts with the Code Editor, run automated tasks with a button click, and share the script with co-workers. See Microsoft’s “Office Scripts in Excel” documentation for details. Insert data from a picture into Excel There are times you may find data inside an image file that you’d like to get into Excel. Typically, you’ll have to input the data from it manually. There’s now a way to have Excel convert the information on the image into data for a worksheet. In the Get & Transform Data group on the Data tab, click the From Picture dropdown and select Picture From File to choose the image you want to grab data from, or Picture from Clipboard to take a screenshot of an image on your PC and then import the data. For more details, see Microsoft’s “Insert data from picture” support page.   Use keyboard shortcuts Here’s one last productivity tip: If you memorize a handful of keyboard shortcuts for common tasks in Excel, you can save a great deal of time over hunting for the right command to click on. See “Handy Excel keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac” for our favorites. This article was originally published in August 2019 and most recently updated in May 2025. More Excel tutorials: Excel basics: Get started with tables Excel basics: Get started with charts and sparklines How to use PivotTables and PivotCharts in Excel How to use slicers in Excel How to use Excel formulas and functions How (and why) to use conditional formatting in Excel How to use Excel macros to save time and automate your work

May 23, 2025Ravie LakshmananArtificial Intelligence / Vulnerability Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an indirect prompt injection flaw in GitLab's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Duo that could have allowed attackers to steal source code and inject untrusted HTML into its responses, which could then be used to direct victims to malicious websites. GitLab Duo is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant that enables users to write, review, and edit code. Built using Anthropic's Claude models, the service was first launched in June 2023. But as Legit Security found, GitLab Duo Chat has been susceptible to an indirect prompt injection flaw that permits attackers to "steal source code from private projects, manipulate code suggestions shown to other users, and even exfiltrate confidential, undisclosed zero-day vulnerabilities." Prompt injection refers to a class of vulnerabilities common in AI systems that enable threat actors to weaponize large language models (LLMs) to manipulate responses to users' prompts and result in undesirable behavior. Indirect prompt injections are a lot more trickier in that instead of providing an AI-crafted input directly, the rogue instructions are embedded within another context, such as a document or a web page, which the model is designed to process. Recent studies have shown that LLMs are also vulnerable to jailbreak attack techniques that make it possible to trick AI-driven chatbots into generating harmful and illegal information that disregards their ethical and safety guardrails, effectively obviating the need for carefully crafted prompts. What's more, Prompt Leakage (PLeak) methods could be used to inadvertently reveal the preset system prompts or instructions that are meant to be followed by the model. "For organizations, this means that private information such as internal rules, functionalities, filtering criteria, permissions, and user roles can be leaked," Trend Micro said in a report published earlier this month. "This could give attackers opportunities to exploit system weaknesses, potentially leading to data breaches, disclosure of trade secrets, regulatory violations, and other unfavorable outcomes." PLeak attack demonstration - Credential Excess / Exposure of Sensitive Functionality The latest findings from the Israeli software supply chain security firm show that a hidden comment placed anywhere within merge requests, commit messages, issue descriptions or comments, and source code was enough to leak sensitive data or inject HTML into GitLab Duo's responses. These prompts could be concealed further using encoding tricks like Base16-encoding, Unicode smuggling, and KaTeX rendering in white text in order to make them less detectable. The lack of input sanitization and the fact that GitLab did not treat any of these scenarios with any more scrutiny than it did source code could have enabled a bad actor to plant the prompts across the site. "Duo analyzes the entire context of the page, including comments, descriptions, and the source code — making it vulnerable to injected instructions hidden anywhere in that context," security researcher Omer Mayraz said. This also means that an attacker could deceive the AI system into including a malicious JavaScript package in a piece of synthesized code, or present a malicious URL as safe, causing the victim to be redirected to a fake login page that harvests their credentials. On top of that, by taking advantage of GitLab Duo Chat's ability to access information about specific merge requests and the code changes inside of them, Legit Security found that it's possible to insert a hidden prompt in a merge request description for a project that, when processed by Duo, causes the private source code to be exfiltrated to an attacker-controlled server. This, in turn, is made possible owing to its use of streaming markdown rendering to interpret and render the responses into HTML as the output is generated. In other words, feeding it HTML code via indirect prompt injection could cause the code segment to be executed on the user's browser. Following responsible disclosure on February 12, 2025, the issues have been addressed by GitLab. "This vulnerability highlights the double-edged nature of AI assistants like GitLab Duo: when deeply integrated into development workflows, they inherit not just context — but risk," Mayraz said. "By embedding hidden instructions in seemingly harmless project content, we were able to manipulate Duo's behavior, exfiltrate private source code, and demonstrate how AI responses can be leveraged for unintended and harmful outcomes." The disclosure comes as Pen Test Partners revealed how Microsoft Copilot for SharePoint, or SharePoint Agents, could be exploited by local attackers to access sensitive data and documentation, even from files that have the "Restricted View" privilege. "One of the primary benefits is that we can search and trawl through massive datasets, such as the SharePoint sites of large organisations, in a short amount of time," the company said. "This can drastically increase the chances of finding information that will be useful to us." The attack techniques follow new research that ElizaOS (formerly Ai16z), a nascent decentralized AI agent framework for automated Web3 operations, could be manipulated by injecting malicious instructions into prompts or historical interaction records, effectively corrupting the stored context and leading to unintended asset transfers. "The implications of this vulnerability are particularly severe given that ElizaOSagents are designed to interact with multiple users simultaneously, relying on shared contextual inputs from all participants," a group of academics from Princeton University wrote in a paper. "A single successful manipulation by a malicious actor can compromise the integrity of the entire system, creating cascading effects that are both difficult to detect and mitigate." Prompt injections and jailbreaks aside, another significant issue ailing LLMs today is hallucination, which occurs when the models generate responses that are not based on the input data or are simply fabricated. According to a new study published by AI testing company Giskard, instructing LLMs to be concise in their answers can negatively affect factuality and worsen hallucinations. "This effect seems to occur because effective rebuttals generally require longer explanations," it said. "When forced to be concise, models face an impossible choice between fabricating short but inaccurate answers or appearing unhelpful by rejecting the question entirely." Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE    

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Microsoft Planner to get a new feature to save hours of your time Paul Hill Neowin @ziks_99 · May 22, 2025 04:12 EDT Microsoft has announced an upcoming feature for the Planner app within teams called Status Reports. If you’re involved with project management at work, there’s a good chance that you’ve created status reports, but creating them can be time consuming and boring. With Status Reports in Planner, Microsoft wants you to be able provide comprehensive project updates within minutes. The new feature generates reports that auto-synthesize your plan progress, milestones, risks, and next steps in just one click. On top of this, you can highlight wins, surface blockers, and give data-backed snapshots of your project’s health for teammates, leadership, or customers. If you are only interested in reporting on a certain timeframe, Status Reports lets you choose which period should be covered. You can also manually define the reporting goals, and adapt the tone for any audience with flexible parameters. Management of reports is easy too, you can instantly view reports generated by your team, manage or browse archived reports, and refine them together in real time. If you ever want to share a report, Microsoft said “drop a Loop component in Teams, copy to Outlook, or transform the report into a SharePoint newsletter for regular updates and engaging communications". To use the feature, open Microsoft Teams and open the Planner app. From there, open a Premium plan or a Plan with Project Manager that has at least ten tasks. You then need to make sure the plan is shared with a group, if not hit the Share button in the top right and do so. Once shared, go to the Reports tab and select Get Started on the top banner. To add a reporting time period, go to Choose reporting period and select the dropdown to choose the period of time to cover. Under Provide more details, you can add specific details that should be included in the report. Select Generate and the Project Manager agent will synthesize the information from the plan to make a tailored report. The report will be in a Loop Canvas to support co-editing and you’ll get an in-app notification with a link to the report. You can copy the Loop component to Teams or Outlook or choose Share as newsletter to generate a SharePoint email. The feature will arrive in the Project Manager agent in the coming weeks for English-US customers. To use the feature, you must have access to Project Manager which is in public preview and requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot and a Microsoft Loop license. If you only have one of these, you can collaborate on plans, but you can’t interact with Project Manager to assign tasks to the project manager or generate a status report. Tags Report a problem with article Follow @NeowinFeed

AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a new AI model focused on coding: Devstral. Devstral, which Mistral says was developed in partnership with AI company All Hands AI, is openly available under an Apache 2.0 license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. Mistral claims that Devstral outperforms other open models like Google’s Gemma 3 27B and Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s V3 on SWE-Bench Verified, a benchmark measuring coding skills. “Devstral excels at using tools to explore codebases, editing multiple files and power[ing] software engineering agents,” writes Mistral in a blog post provided to TechCrunch. “[I]t runs over code agent scaffolds such as OpenHands or SWE-Agent, which define the interface between the model and the test cases […] Devstral is light enough to run on a single [Nvidia] RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32GB RAM, making it an ideal choice for local deployment and on-device use.” Results from Mistral’s internal benchmarking evaluations of Devstral.Image Credits:Mistral Devstral arrives as AI coding assistants — and the models powering them — grow increasingly popular. Just last month, JetBrains, the company behind a range of popular app development tools, released its first “open” AI model for coding. In recent months, AI outfits including Google, Windsurf, and OpenAI have also unveiled models, both openly available and proprietary, optimized for programming tasks. AI models still struggle to code quality software — code-generating AI tends to introduce security vulnerabilities and errors, owing to weaknesses in areas like the ability to understand programming logic. Yet their promise to boost coding productivity is pushing companies — and developers — to rapidly adopt them. One recent poll found that 76% of devs used or were planning to use AI tools in their development processes last year. Mistral previously waded into the assistive programming space with Codestral, a generative model for code. But Codestral wasn’t released under a license that permitted devs to use the model for commercial applications; its license explicitly banned “any internal usage by employees in the context of [a] company’s business activities.” Devstral, which Mistral is calling a “research preview,” can be downloaded from AI development platforms including Hugging Face and also tapped through Mistral’s API. It’s priced at $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.3 per million output tokens, tokens being the raw bits of data that AI models work with. (A million tokens is equivalent to about 750,000 words, or roughly 163,000 words longer than “War and Peace.”) Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW Mistral says it’s “hard at work building a larger agentic coding model that will be available in the coming weeks.” Devstral isn’t a small model per se, but it’s on the smaller side at 24 billion parameters. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.) Mistral, founded in 2023, is a frontier model lab, aiming to build a range of AI-powered services, including a chatbot platform, Le Chat, and mobile apps. It’s backed by VCs including General Catalyst, and has raised over €1.1 billion (roughly $1.24 billion) to date. Mistral’s customers include BNP Paribas, AXA, and Mirakl. Devstral is Mistral’s third product launch this month. A few weeks ago, Mistral launched Mistral Medium 3, an efficient general-purpose model. Around the same time, the company rolled out Le Chat Enterprise, a corporate-focused chatbot service that offers tools like an AI “agent” builder and integrates Mistral’s models with third-party services like Gmail, Google Drive, and SharePoint.

Editor's take: Windows 11 brought a slew of UI changes and "improvements" few users welcome. File Explorer's state is particularly dire, yet Microsoft shows no sign of backing off its relentless quest to make the interface worse. What should be a simple file manager is now a confusing mess, frustrating longtime users and driving a flood of third-party fixes. Microsoft's revamp of the Windows 11 File Explorer context menu hid or removed many helpful features, sparking a boom in third-party tools to restore the old interface. Once again, Microsoft is reinventing the wheel with a redesigned Start Menu that brings more frustrating changes to the right-click menu. The Redmond corporation has added a new "AI action" sub-menu to File Explorer's context menu. This change is already available to unpaid beta testers in the Windows Insider program with the recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26200.5603 (KB5058488) released to the Dev Channel. Microsoft explains that AI actions in File Explorer offer a deeper interaction with users' files through AI technology. The first four AI actions focus on image editing. Bing Visual Search helps find similar pictures online. Blur Background and Erase Objects automatically detect and modify objects and backgrounds in Photos. Remove Background lets users extract an image's background in Paint. The four AI context menu options support JPG and PNG files but hardly represent an AI revolution. These new actions directly link Bing search or image-editing features from the File Explorer menu – nothing extraordinary about that. Microsoft plans to launch new Copilot-powered AI actions in the coming weeks. Microsoft 365 subscribers will soon get a new "Summarize" option to generate summaries of larger documents – Word, PDF, or TXT – stored on OneDrive and SharePoint. Microsoft also has a "Create an FAQ" feature that utilizes Copilot's chatbot to transform cloud documents into a neatly formatted, AI-generated Q&A list. // Related Stories The new Microsoft 365-exclusive AI actions sound far more promising than a handful of shortcuts to AI tools in a couple of Windows-native image editors. Still, I'd bet a kidney they won't ease the frustration for anyone who's disliked Windows 11 File Explorer since day one. Microsoft's new mission is to bring AI everywhere, so get ready to welcome your fully AI-powered Windows operating system sooner than you think.

Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint.The new AI actions in the File Explorer context menu. Image: MicrosoftMicrosoft is also planning to test similar AI actions for Office files soon, enabling you to summarize documents stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, or quickly create AI-generated lists from files. These Office AI actions will be limited to Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers with a Copilot license, and consumer support is “coming later.”It’s not clear if these AI actions can be disabled in the context menu, but they also join an “Ask Copilot” option that Microsoft added to the right-click menu of the File Explorer recently.The new AI-powered feed in the widgets board. Image: MicrosoftAlongside the AI-powered shortcuts in File Explorer, Microsoft is also testing some visual changes to the widgets feature in Windows 11, “with a more organized, personalized, and engaging feed,” according to the Windows Insider team. “In addition, we are introducing Copilot-curated stories into the feed.”This latest Dev Channel build also includes a new “User Interaction-Aware CPU Power Management” feature, which Microsoft describes as an OS-level change to reduce power consumption on laptops and tablets. “After a period of inactivity on your PC, Windows now conserves power by automatically applying efficient power management policies,” says the Windows Insider team. “This happens seamlessly to save energy while you’re inactive, with full performance instantly restored the moment you get back to it.”See More:

Microsoft Word’s spell check can already suggest words in real time, but imagine an “idea check” future in which AI suggests ideas on the fly as users type. This is how Microsoft is evolving Copilot — as an AI assistant predicting ideas in real time by tapping into unique corporate and user data. That’s an idea the company shared for Microsoft 365 as generative AI technology sinks deeper into the guts of the software. Specifically, Microsoft on Monday released a feature called Copilot Tuning, which will allow enterprises to deploy specialized AI models and agents that are fine-tuned to company operations and data. The feature was announced at Microsoft’s Build developer show being held this week. With Copilot Tuning, companies can train models on their own data and deploy AI agents that make use of their unique terms, context, and processes, said Jason Henderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 product management, in an interview with Computerworld. “AI is going to have to … integrate the knowledge from your work into your specific Copilot so it can customize documents and workflows to the way your company works,” Henderson said. The larger goal behind Tuning is to create an “enterprise brain” that is a digital representation of an organization’s unique way of handling information, processing it and making decisions. That is key to creating Copilots that can recommend ideas, Henderson said. The ability to fine-tune AI to internal data changes the way model reasons and responds. That, in turn, changes how employees create documents and generate summaries. Henderson gave the example of a longstanding law firm with more than 100 years of institutional knowledge and precedents. The partners are retiring and taking their knowledge with them. “What they’re really interested in is fine-tuning into these models all these legal agreements that they have built over many, many years. And then being able to create new ones based on that learning,” Henderson said. Microsoft Copilot launched in 2023 providing generic responses from genAI large language models (LLMs), notably OpenAI’s GPT series. About 70% of Fortune 500 companies are now using Copilot in some form, according to Microsoft. Although LLM-based chatbots such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and especially OpenAI’s ChatGPT remain popular, some companies are shifting to smaller reasoning models that are fine-tuned to domain data, finding the smaller models cheaper, faster, more customizable, and more secure. Microsoft says Copilot Tuning is the starting point to creating hyper-personalized features, such as suggesting ideas in real time as a person writes a document in Word. “I can think of this as a spell check of the future where it knows the words that your company uses. It’s going to predict based on what it knows about your company. It might be one thing in manufacturing versus in pharmaceuticals. It’s trying to help you get one step ahead by bringing to your fingertips what you need,” Henderson said. Security is an important part of Copilot Tuning, and the data is usually pulled and referenced from Microsoft SharePoint, which monitors access to files. Microsoft is creating a chain of custody and security from documents to the model. “We’re starting with SharePoint, but with connectors, we can bring in many, many different systems,” Henderson said. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI all offer ways to integrate enterprise data into LLMs as well.  The new Copilot Tuning offering doesn’t require data scientists or coders, and it has a point-and-click interface within Copilot Studio. It can be used by regular employees who may think, “hey, I want to make my department’s life easier,” Henderson said. Microsoft is also creating “recipes” that are targeted at generating documents and summaries, or for data analysis and accounting tasks. “We’re going to identify which models best handle those recipes, doing a lot of experimentation to pick the right model for each particular recipe. Over the next six months, we’ll continue to build out more recipes as we identify durable problem spaces that companies are interested in addressing with Copilot Tuning,” Henderson said. The Copilot Tuning functionality will begin rolling out to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers next month as part of its “Early Adopter Program.” Microsoft’s Copilot Wave 2 spring release — which includes a new Copilot app with new search, summarization, and personalization functionality — is now generally available.