Excel: Making Productivity Easier With ‘Smart Lookup’

Written by Kevin Landers | Apr 29, 2021 12:15:00 PM

Productivity is not just getting more done; it is also about having less to do.

Businesses constantly need to improve their efficiency to stay competitive. Getting more done in less time, with less effort, is just as productive as working hard toward achieving difficult tasks. This is what technology has enabled us to do over the years and we can now do things much faster with less effort.

What were once tedious and time-consuming business tasks can now be done in no time with exceptional ease. Today, everything has changed, thanks to the power of computing and the development of applications such as those found in Microsoft 365.

Microsoft 365, formerly known as Microsoft Office, has been an evolving suite of applications that has been a pillar of modern businesses since its inception. Excel is one of these applications that has consistently enabled making spreadsheets a convenient reality for everyone.

Excel: The 'Go to' Spreadsheet Application

Spreadsheets in the past were difficult to create, understand and use for the average person. Now, we can create, understand and extensively use spreadsheets on Excel for any number of tasks and we have now been doing so for a few decades.

If you work with spreadsheets, Excel is your 'go to' application because of its many features and immense time saving and organizational benefits.

However, with so many powerful features, it can sometimes be hard to keep track of all of them and we may forget some useful features overtime. Which is why we have a reminder for one such feature, which you may find helpful for productivity.

Excel: Making Productivity Easier With ‘Smart Lookup’

The Smart Lookup feature is one of the best features in Excel that helps with researching. If you need to research something in a particular cell of an Excel spreadsheet, you can simply right click on the cell and select Smart Lookup.

Excel will then automatically launch the Bing search engine, with the contents of that cell already in the process of a search. You will instantly get results, allowing you to search the web for what is in the cell, without having to go through with the entire process of manually searching for it.

The results include anything from definitions, Wikipedia entries, the rate of inflation, export statistics or other financial or business data. This 'Smart Lookup', or instant search, capability of Excel saves you time and hence adds to your productivity.

Excel: Constantly Improving Productivity

With constant updates to improve AI, Smart Lookup's ability to provide you with the information you need, keeps improving overtime. You will get better and better results with each passing update to further improve your productivity.

With Excel, not only do you get more done, but you also have less to do, making it a double-edged sword of productivity.

To learn more about the unique features of Microsoft 365 and its applications, please get in touch with us today.