Microsoft is planning an overhaul of our Office documents, weaving live data into the once-static fabric of our Word files and Excel spreadsheets. It’s a bold experiment that could kill the very definition of an Office “document”—but it could also spell the rebirth of Microsoft’s productivity suite in the age of cloud-driven collaboration.
At its Build 2013 conference in June, Microsoft evangelized tools that will enable app developers to automatically use Bing’s search capabilities in documents—for example, they might enhance a travel guide with live demographic information on Belize. And Microsoft’s new PowerBI tools, announced Monday at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference, can import data from both public and private sources to provide more up-to-date context in documents.
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