Microsoft integrates powerful spreadsheet search functionality in Office 365

Spreadsheets — they’re filled with numbers, formulas, and if you’ve ever attempted to scroll down a blank Excel sheet, you’d have come to the horrific realization that they can be infinite too. Still, they are extremely powerful tools especially for organizations large and small to help them manage financials.

The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group, or EuSpRIG for short, has recently highlighted the need for powerful spreadsheet management as such documents could very dangerous to a company if they ever were to fall into the wrong hands. To help make that possible, Microsoft has made the search functionality in Office 365 smarter when it comes to spreadsheets.

In order to make searching for and within spreadsheets easier, they need to be managed and categorized first. Microsoft accomplishes this by integrating the same sophisticated functionality to categorize spreadsheets and other documents that was introduced in Office 2013 to Office 365. This functionality, called the Discovery and Risk Assessment tool, in Microsoft’s words:

“…helps you find spreadsheets in your organization and determine which present the greatest risk, so you can take steps to reduce your risks. It does this by crawling network shares and SharePoint sites to find the spreadsheets; then analyzes and rates each one for complexity, materiality (impact to the organization) and risk based on configurable criteria. Businesses are using this powerful tool to gain better visibility of their spreadsheet inventory.”

This enables several new search properties to be used when looking for specific spreadsheets. Users can now search based on the number of unique formula sets, the total number of cells containing formulas, the number of sheets, data connections, linked workbooks in a spreadsheet, or the path and filenames to those linked workbooks.

Users can use these search properties in any search box on SharePoint Online, or the eDiscovery Center in the Office 365 admin center. In the future, Microsoft plans to create a new search experience in Office 365 that will guide and make it easier for users to use these search properties.

You can read the detailed report on how these search properties work and how they benefit enterprise customers by clicking the VIA link below.