Microsoft is embedding Excel into Teams, speeding up collaboration around spreadsheets and data.
One of the other exciting technologies being rolled out from Microsoft is a new platform for building collaborative apps, the Fluid Framework. It allows users to collaborate on documents in real time, using document containers to embed collaborative content and applications inside web pages and web views. After a few years of development and several trial applications, we now see it starting to be offered in various Office products.
The Fluid Framework is what powers the Loop components that appear in Outlook, as well as the Live Share app tools in Teams. It’s a way for applications to share state, manage updates as they come in, to have a common view of the document that updates as changes are made, and without the need to do complex locking. complex to prevent problems. Because it’s built on web technology, Fluid is intended for either hosted browser content or apps that run inside the browser.
Embed apps and work in Teams
If you have a Microsoft 365 subscriptions you can understand how Fluid works by using the Loop components in the web version of Outlook, which can be edited by anyone who receives an email with them embedded in the message. However, where Fluid really shines is inside Teams, transforming it from a place for meetings and chats to a host for collaboration, sharing apps and views with colleagues, and for Allow them to interact with your content. Because Teams is built on web technology, Fluid is easily integrated and Fluid is used in a variety of applications.
The first embedded Teams Office app is PowerPoint Live, a presentation that allows for more interaction. It’s still a one-to-many tool, though, with improvements to how you can switch from presenter to presenter, and adding a live response-based conversation along with the presentation for more fun. dynamic response. Accessed from the meeting’s Share drop-down menu, it’s a lot easier to use and more efficient than click-and-miss screen sharing.
Microsoft is taking that concept a step further with Excel Live announcement during Satya Nadella’s keynote at Inspire 2022. It’s a feature that seems set to change the way we work as a team and the way we use documents in meetings.
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Using Excel Live
By far, the best way to collaborate on an Excel spreadsheet is to save the file in OneDrive, open on every collaborator’s desktop, with the lead sharing their screen via Teams. Changes are slow to be implemented and conflict is very common, with the lead having to roll back the changes and instruct the team to implement the agreed fixes. For productivity software, it’s not very efficient.
Excel Live aims to change that, as PowerPoint Live, by building Excel into the Teams environment and using Fluid to connect each user’s version of the sheet. Although underneath there is a huge software infrastructure, but for the user, it is very easy to use.
When you’re in a meeting and want to share a spreadsheet to edit, edit formulas, or reduce counts temporarily, you can quickly open an Excel workbook using the Share tool similar to PowerPoint Live. Scroll down and you’ll see a list of recent, ready-to-share workbooks. Open the account you want to use and you’ll be asked to share it with your meeting. This will open the workbook inside the Teams meeting, with everyone’s video still visible and the shared spreadsheet visible to everyone.
Since Excel Live is being displayed using the same technology that runs Excel Online, the user doesn’t need to have a copy, so as long as you can run Teams, you can edit the spreadsheet. Very useful if you’re using Excel on the web, you can use it to launch an Excel Live session from within a spreadsheet, by choosing Work together in Teams from Excel’s Share menu. This opens a Teams meeting, where you can invite attendees with the spreadsheet open and ready to edit.
It’s a useful feature, building on the special collaboration features in Teams. You may not always have an agenda or schedule for a meeting, only to discover that the numbers you need aren’t up to date, or that you need a subject matter expert when designing a set. new computing combinations and want to run your business in the past they.
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When can you use Excel Live?
Excel Live will launch as a preview at the end of August 2022, and users will need to make sure their Team tenants have signed up for the preview program. Set a policy in the Teams admin center to follow a user’s Office Preview settings or to allow any user access to Teams preview. Users who have opted in to the Office Preview program will automatically have access to Excel Live when it launches after they’ve set up Teams to support previews, while other users will need to request access go to the preview inside their Teams app settings.
It’s unclear when Excel Live will generally be available, but the preview should get users ready for how it can help teams collaborate around documents. It’s a good idea to start with a small trial at first, expanding access to the preview before one learns how it can help organizations and how it works across a mix of corporate and corporate networks. consumers.
As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in her inspirational keynote, “We need to be great at sync, async, live, and remote collaboration. In the old days, you could skip one or two of these quadrants, but now we need all four of these quadrants to be excellent at any given time for the job to be done. and cooperation takes place”. It’s clear from both the Build announcement and these new features that Microsoft sees this as more of a repository for bot-driven workflow snippets. With Excel Live, you’ll be able to collaborate on spreadsheets in ways not supported in the desktop app, supporting both big-screen office meetings and home workers on the desktop. their laptop.
Nadella’s conclusion from her keynote summarizes what the launch of Excel Live means for businesses and users. “If Teams were where we worked, we would want to access everything right there in the workflow, returning our most scarce resource, our time.”
