Calc Intelligence

Calc Intelligence

The Calc Intelligence team at Microsoft Research is dedicated to advancing the state of the art in spreadsheet technology and experience. Our research appears in top publication venues and our work’s impact on many millions of customers features in the history of research collaborations with Microsoft Excel (opens in new tab), the Microsoft Wall of Fame (opens in new tab), and even XKCD (opens in new tab).  

A Timeline

November 1, 2023: Microsoft starts selling (opens in new tab) Microsoft 365 Copilot (opens in new tab). Calc Intel’s research contributes to Copilot in Excel (opens in new tab), especially to the calculated columns feature.

October 4-6, 2023: Happy to publish two papers at the IEEE VL/HCC conference. They are the inspection tool ColDeco, and the debugger FxD, which received “Honorable Mention, Best Paper“. See our blog Microsoft at VL/HCC 2023: Focus on co-audit tools for spreadsheets.

October 2, 2023: We posted our paper “Co-audit: tools to help humans double-check AI-generated content (opens in new tab)“. Listen to our MSR podcast Abstracts: October 23, 2023 (opens in new tab) about the paper. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott first disclosed our work on co-audit in an interview with The Verge (opens in new tab) in May 2023.

September 19, 2023: Our Python Editor in Excel Labs for Python in Excel is out today. See the blog post (opens in new tab) by Chris Gross and Jack. It allows you to write and edit Python formulas in Excel using a dedicated code editor with similar capabilities as those available in Python notebook environments.

July 6, 2023: Andy and Jack presented their keynote talk “Bringing generative AI to the Excel grid: from research to practice” at the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group annual conference (opens in new tab).

June 5, 2023: Jack presented at Lambda Days, a conference on functional programming that brings together academia and industry. The talk Bringing LAMBDA to Excel (opens in new tab), covered our work on LAMBDA, and most recently, Excel Labs.

April 23-28, 2023: Delighted to publish our paper “What It Wants Me To Say (opens in new tab)” at ACM CHI 2023. It received “Honorable Mention, Best Paper (opens in new tab)“.

April 10, 2023: In partnership with the Excel team, we announced Excel Labs, a Microsoft Garage Project in this blog post (opens in new tab). Check it out on the Office Store (opens in new tab)! It’s a great way for us to acquire feedback from Excel users on experimental spreadsheet features arising from our research. Coverage on The Register (opens in new tab) and NeoWin (opens in new tab).

December 20, 2022: Excited by the announcement (opens in new tab) of the AI-powered Formula Suggestions feature for Excel, outcome of a collaboration with our team at MSR Cambridge. Update in June 2023: here is a blog post about the feature (opens in new tab).

June 29, 2022: Andy presented a talk on Why Statistical Thinking is Transforming Programming Language Research (opens in new tab) at the Colloquium on Probabilistic Programming (opens in new tab) at Collège de France.

February 8, 2022: The advanced formula environment (AFE), a Microsoft Garage project, makes creating, editing, and reusing named formulas and LAMBDA functions easy. Today, Excel LAMBDA is generally available on all Excel endpoints, and we release the advanced formula environment. See this blog post by Jack Williams of Calc Intel and Chris Gross, Excel PM for LAMBDA. And for further details see the Garage page for AFE.

October 12, 2021: Andy, Jack and our former intern Matt McCutchen are presenting at EXCEL VIRTUALLY GLOBAL 2021 (opens in new tab), a conference for the Excel community – looking forward to a lot of learning! We’ll be presenting a new plugin for easily editing LAMBDAs and some of the research from our team. Update: the videos are available here (opens in new tab).

October 11, 2021: Jack and Andy are presenting their paper Where-Provenance for Bidirectional Editing in Spreadsheets (opens in new tab) at VL/HCC 2021 (opens in new tab).

May 7, 2021: Andy spoke on Excel meets Lambda (opens in new tab) at Harley Eades’ seminar (opens in new tab) at Augusta University. New material on XSUM, a sample LAMBDA that can add columns of texts including arithmetic expressions and uncertain ranges, interpreted probabilistically.

April 22, 2021: See xkcd 2453 (opens in new tab).

April 13, 2021: Our work features prominently in a detailed history of research collaborations in Excel: Innovation by (and beyond) the numbers. The story starts with the paper on sheet-defined functions by Simon Peyton Jones in our team, and our academic colleagues Margaret Burnett and Alan Blackwell, back in 2003. And today, as David Gainer (Vice President of Product, Office) writes, MSR researchers are a “core part of the Excel team helping create the product’s future“. Come join us!

February 18, 2021: Andy and Simon keynoted on Excel meets Lambda (opens in new tab) at the Lambda Days 2021 (opens in new tab) conference.

January 25, 2021: Microsoft Excel the programming language is evolving. With the recent release of LAMBDA, users can now define new functions in the program’s formula language. Read our blog post LAMBDA: the ultimate Excel worksheet function to learn about the feature and about research opportunities within the Calc Intelligence team.

January 19, 2021: Microsoft Research sponsors the POPL 2021 research conference. Watch this sponsor video, made by the Calc Intel team, to learn about research in our project at MSR and to hear from the Excel team about our partnership.

December 3, 2020: LAMBDA, the ultimate spreadsheet function, is out for Excel Beta customers. LAMBDA turns Excel formulas into custom functions (opens in new tab). Our team has worked deeply with Excel (opens in new tab) to help deliver features including Dynamic Arrays, Data Types, LET, and now LAMBDA.

November 5, 2020: Shuang presented our entity-property tabular linking system (opens in new tab) at ISWC which was awarded 2nd prize in the SemTab competition (opens in new tab).

August 26, 2020: Matt presented our paper (opens in new tab) on Elastic Sheet-Defined Functions at the International Conference on Functional Programming.

August 9, 2020: Simon’s talk on Elastic Sheet-Defined Functions (opens in new tab) from the Haskell Love Conference (opens in new tab) is now available online (opens in new tab).

July 13, 2020: We are delighted to announce that Calc.ts in Excel for the web is inducted into the Microsoft Garage Wall of Fame. Customers increasingly use the web version of Excel, from Teams, Outlook.com, and Office 365. When you use Excel on the web, Calc.ts evaluates your formulas in the browser to accelerate your experience of calculation to desktop performance. Calc.ts has been a thrilling three-year collaboration between Calc Intelligence at MSR Cambridge and the Excel team. Excel for the web has so many users that Calc.ts saves them seven person-years every day!

May 15, 2020: We sent a journal-version of our work on Elastic Sheet-Defined Functions (opens in new tab) to the Journal of Functional Programming. We are excited that this work is cross-disciplinary – we assess both with the formal development expected in the PL community and also with a comparative user study as expected by the HCI community. Update: our paper is accepted for the journal, and will be presented at (opens in new tab) the International Conference on Functional Programming, August 2020.

April 28, 2020: Andy was delighted to brief techies at JPMorgan Chase, via Zoom, on our long-term collaboration with Excel on Project Yellow. Here is his deck: Project Yellow: Bringing Data Types and Functional Programming to Excel He spoke about some of the amazing features we’ve contributed to and that are now shipping in Excel, like data types, dynamic arrays, and the brand new LET function, together with some longer-term research we have published on Calculation View and Elastic Sheet-Defined Functions.

April 2020: we are publishing papers about our Gridlets concept for re-use in spreadsheets at ESOP 2020 and CHI EA 2020. Our ESOP 2020 paper presents the first formal calculus of spreadsheets with spilled arrays, a powerful concept recently introduced by Excel’s dynamic arrays. We also report results from a survey about the relationship between programming and spreadsheet experience in a CHI EA 2020 paper.

October 17, 2019: Happy Spreadsheet Day 2019 (opens in new tab)! It is 40 years since the first electronic spreadsheet, VisiCalc 1.0, was launched on October 17, 1979. Remember, life begins at 40. Excited for the next 40 years!

September 10, 2019: Andy’s keynote talk on End-User Probabilistic Programming (opens in new tab) at the QEST 2019 (opens in new tab) conference in Glasgow.

August 20, 2019: our session on the Future of Spreadsheeting (opens in new tab) at the Microsoft Faculty Summit (opens in new tab). Bill Gates (opens in new tab) was there too!

January 14, 2019: our blog on Influencing Mainstream Software-applying PL research ideas to transform spreadsheets.