New to Office.com/setup 365 in August—updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Yammer, and more

This month, we’re rolling out improvements to help you build a more productive, collaborative, and secure work environment for you and your organization. The new XLOOKUP formula for Excel helps you find data and improve calculation time. OneNote and Yammer mobile updates help you work on the go and find the answers you need more quickly. And the new FastTrack guidance will help ensure seamless Windows 10 migrations.

As always, every Office.com/setup 365 update reflects our commitment to improving the experience for you—so if you have feedback or ideas on ways we can improve, please let us know.

Make work faster and easier

New features simplify data searches and calculation times and help you quickly visualize information.

Find and retrieve data quickly in Excel—We heard your feedback about the VLOOKUP formula for working with data in Excel—that it requires sorted data, fails to discover results on left-hand columns, and takes wildcards by default. So this month, we introduced XLOOKUP, our successor to the VLOOKUP, and HLOOKUP formulas. XLOOKUP addresses our most common user feedback and takes advantage of recent backend changes to improve calculation time. It‘s available today to Office Insiders, with general availability coming later this year.

Create work-in-progress diagrams and slides—Because we know it can be hard to express work-in-progress diagrams and models without stamping “DRAFT” on top of them, we built Sketched Shapes. With this new Office-style, you can transform standard shapes in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel into rough outlines that look hand-drawn and convey a sense of in-progress work. Sketched Shapes is perfect for building wireframes, drafting designs, or adding an artistic touch. You can also easily move between sketched and standard shapes. Sketched Shapes is currently rolling out to Windows Insiders and Office Insiders for Mac. To get started, insert a shape into your document and select your favorite sketched outline. You can also download the PowerPoint Wireframe toolkit for more information.

New for PowerPoint on the web: Subscript, Superscript, and Change Case—Up to this point, users needed the PowerPoint Desktop App to add subscript, superscript, or change text casing in their slides. That made it tricky for professionals, educators, and students to communicate their equations and information in PowerPoint for the web. Now, you can simply select your text and click the new Subscript, Superscript, or Change Case buttons on the Home tab of the ribbon. This feature is rolling out to PowerPoint for the web.