Microsoft's latest Office Insider Preview Build 13029.20200 in the Current Channel brings new features for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook

Microsoft has released a new Office Build for Office Insiders on Windows in the Current Channel. The new Office Insider Preview Build 13029.20200 brings a couple of exciting new features for Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Talking about what’s new, Microsoft has added a new feature to Excel called Sheet View, which lets you sort and filter your Excel file while collaborating with others. Other new Excel features include LET function, the ability to create PivotTable from Power BI datasets, Speedy SUMIFS. With the latest Office Insider Preview Build installed, Outlooks users will be able to quickly reopen items from a previous Outlook session, disable @ mentions, create polls in emails quickly and easily. You can read the official changelog below.

Changelog

Excel

Sheet View

You can now sort and filter your Excel file while collaborating with others with Sheet View. This new feature prevents you from being impacted by other user’s sorts and filters while coauthoring the document.

Learn more >

LET – Names in formulas for Excel

The LET function allows you to name, and then use a calculation or value in your formulas, and increase both readability (by giving context to others) and performance (by reducing the number of times an expression is calculated). It’s names but on a formula level.

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Create a PivotTable from Power BI datasets

You can create PivotTables in Excel that are connected to datasets stored in Power BI with a few clicks. Doing this allows you get the best of both PivotTables and Power BI.

Learn more >

Speedy SUMIFS

Have you ever used SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS, COUNTIFS, MAXIFS, and MINIFS as well as their singular counterparts SUMIF, AVERAGEIF, COUNTIF, MAXIF, and MINIF to aggregate lots of data?  In this update of Excel, you’ll notice these calculations are noticeably faster.

These functions now create an internal cached index for the column range being searched in each expression. This cached index is reused in any subsequent aggregations that are pulling from the same range. The effect is dramatic: For example calculating 1200 SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS, and COUNTIFS formulas aggregating data from 1 million cells on a 4 core 2 GHz CPU that took 20 seconds to calculate using Excel 2010, now takes 8 seconds only, on Excel M365 2006.

PowerPoint

Faster playback comes to Microsoft Stream videos

Microsoft Stream lets people in your organization upload, view, and share videos securely. You can share recordings of classes, meetings, presentations, training sessions, or other videos that your team needs. We previously enabled Stream as one of the supported online video sources in PowerPoint. Over the last few months, we’ve made significant performance improvements to the video playback experience. Now you’ll experience faster playback of Stream videos in your PowerPoint presentations.

Outlook

Create polls in email quickly and easily

Easily create a poll, collect votes, and view results within an email.

Learn more>

Quickly reopen items from previous session

We added an option to quickly reopen items from a previous Outlook session. Whether Outlook crashes or you close it, you’ll now be able to quickly relaunch items when you reopen the app. This feature is on by default. To turn it off, go to Options > General > Start up Options.

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Disable @ mentions

Do you find the @ mention picker more annoying than useful? Now you can turn it off. Find the option under the new checkbox under File > Options > Mail > Send Messages in Outlook.

Transfer Outlook settings automatically

Outlook will now store/retrieve settings from the cloud, so when you set up a new Windows device, your settings will be loaded automatically based on your Office identity.

Store your signatures in the cloud

Signatures now follow your account across Windows devices. Set up your account once, and new installations of Outlook will have your signatures.

To update to the latest Office Insider Preview Build, open any Office program and go to File> Account> Update Options> Update Now.