22 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019NEWS 10 BIGGEST IGNITE REVEALS
OFFICE SCRIPTS FOR EXCEL
ARE JUST SMART
You may be familiar with Format Painter for
Excel: Once you’ve nailed down a few cells
just so, you can “paint” that format onto
others, without really knowing what you’re
doing. Office Scripts takes that to another
level, in that you can essentially record a
macro of your actions in a notebook and then
apply them to others. Scripts can be stored in
OneDrive, shared, and combined with up to
300 connections and actions, Microsoft says.
It will be in public preview for the web by the
end of the year.APPLICATION GUARD
COMES TO WORD, EXCEL
AND POWERPOINT
Very few of you have probably used Windows
Device Application Guard (WDAG (go.
pcworld.com/wndv)), a protected browserwithin Windows that walls off your computer
via virtualization. We’ve previously wondered
whether virtualization could be used
elsewhere within Windows (go.pcworld.
com/else). In Office 365 ProPlus, it will.
O365 ProPlus will wall off untrusted
Word, PowerPoint, and Excel spreadsheets
within a virtualized container. If the file hides
malware, your PC will be protected
automatically. (Labeling it as trusted will
trigger an additional check against the
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat
Protection threat cloud.) Application Guard
shouldn’t require any manual administration—
and that’s a good thing. Microsoft says this is
in limited preview and should roll out in 2020.A NEW OFFICE APP FOR IOS,
ANDROID
If you typically open those apps in the Office
mobile app for Android or iOS, there’s a new
Office app that is
designed to serve
as the focal point
for mobile
document creation
and editing, much
as the mobile
Outlook app
houses both email
and its calendaring
application.
Today, the
desktop OfficeApplication Guard takes the same virtualization technologies in WDAG and
applies them to Office documents.