Check out InstaFact, Microsoft Hackathon 2016 Winner

At this year’s //oneweek Hackathon, Microsoft’s annual hackathon event, more than 1,560 teams competed, which saw more than 3,800 projects from around the world. Microsoft crowned the InstaFact team as the grand prize winner of Microsoft Hackathon 2016. “InstaFact ‘automagically’ brings the power of Bing’s knowledge graph into Microsoft Office apps like Word and Excel, saving the user time and cognitive load, since they don’t have to app-switch to get the answer or information they need.

Let’s say you’re writing a report on Washington state that includes historical dates and a spreadsheet of cities and population. To do that now you need to search for the info online and then copy and paste, which is tedious and slow, as you toggle between web, report and data columns.

But someday, you might be able to use InstaFact, a new solution built by a team of Microsoft employees to help writers, researchers and pretty much anyone else who needs facts quickly. The Office plug-in infers the facts you want, mines a massive information repository to get them, auto-completes your facts in Word and auto-fills your data cells in Excel — all with a few simple clicks.

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