Microsoft is incorporating Excel directly into Teams meetings. Excel Live is a new way for team meeting participants to edit Excel spreadsheets together in real time. He is part of a trio of new features coming to Teams that continue Microsoft’s focus on hybrid work. Teams is also receiving video clips that can be shared in collaborative chats and annotations that allow peers to draw on content during Teams meetings.
Excel Live is part of Microsoft’s Live Share functionality on Microsoft Teams that the company detailed earlier this year. “What it does is it allows you, in a team meeting, to edit a live workbook in real time, right at the meeting stage,” explains Nicole Herskowitz, vice president of Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “People can just come in and start editing an Excel workbook, and they should never leave the meeting screen.”
Excel Live within Microsoft Teams. Image: Microsoft
You don’t even need Excel installed or running on a device, and you can even set specific permissions or use features such as tracking changes as you would in a regular version of Excel. “This is using full Excel,” Herskowitz says. “Excel Live is based on our Fluid Framework, which allows for this type of experience.”
This good integration of Excel should arrive in August and will complement a new feature of collaborative annotations in Teams that launches today. Collaborative annotations allow all meeting participants to draw, write, or react to any content that is shared in a meeting. These are basically the same tools you’d find in the Microsoft Whiteboard app, but you don’t have to launch a standalone experience or import content to start scoring.
You can scribble, write, or post notes within Microsoft Teams presentations. Image: Microsoft
You can highlight things, place post-it notes on the screen, or just draw everywhere. “It allows for these slate-rich experiences on any screen,” Herskowitz explains. “It basically makes any space more collaborative.” Collaborative annotations are designed to be ephemeral, so they only live within a team meeting. “There are no export capabilities right now, so you would probably take a photo or screenshot to save it for future reference,” Herskowitz says.
The latest major addition to Microsoft Teams is Video Clip. This new feature allows anyone to record and send short video clips in a Teams chat. It’s basically a video voice message and it’s very similar to the video clips Slack released last year. Video clips can last up to a minute and are ideal for asynchronous communication where you may have a partner in a different time zone and want to leave a video message.