Microsoft is bringing Excel immediately into Teams conferences. Excel Live is a brand new method for Teams assembly contributors to edit Excel spreadsheets collectively in actual time. It’s a part of a trio of latest options coming to Teams that proceed Microsoft’s give attention to hybrid work. Teams can also be getting video clips that may be shared in chats and collaborative annotations that enable colleagues to doodle on high of content material throughout Teams conferences.

Excel Live is a part of Microsoft’s Live Share performance in Microsoft Teams that the corporate detailed earlier this yr. “What it does is it allows you in a Teams meeting to edit a workbook live in real time, right in that meeting stage itself,” explains Nicole Herskowitz, vice chairman of Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge. “People can just jump in and start editing an Excel workbook, and they never have to leave the meeting screen.”

You don’t even want Excel put in or operating on a tool, and you may even set particular permissions or use options like monitoring adjustments as you’ll in an everyday model of Excel. “This is using full Excel,” says Herskowitz. “Excel Live is built on top of our Fluid Framework, which allows for this kind of experience.”

This neat integration of Excel ought to arrive someday in August, and it’ll complement a brand new collaborative annotations characteristic in Teams that launches immediately. Collaborative annotations lets all assembly contributors draw, kind, or react on high of any content material that’s shared in a gathering. It’s basically the identical instruments you’d discover in Microsoft’s Whiteboard app, however you don’t should launch a separate expertise or import content material to start out annotating.

You can spotlight issues, place Post-it notes on the display, or simply doodle in all places. “It allows those whiteboard rich experiences on any screen,” explains Herskowitz. “It makes basically any space more collaborative.” Collaborative annotations are designed to be ephemeral, so that they dwell solely inside a Teams assembly. “Right now there’s no exporting capabilities, so you’d probably take a picture or a screenshot to save that for future reference,” says Herskowitz.

The final massive addition to Microsoft Teams is Video Clip. This new characteristic lets anybody document and ship quick video clips in a Teams chat. It’s basically a video voicemail, and it’s similar to the video clips that Slack launched final yr. Video clips might be as much as a minute lengthy and are perfect for asynchronous communication the place you might need a colleague in a unique time zone and need to depart them a video message.