Microsoft' new Bing Apps for Office 365 provide Maps, Stock data in Excel, and more

Microsoft has continued its push to make Office 365 and its search engine more popular by launching five new Bing Apps for Office 365.

These apps are designed to let you fetch information from external sources without interrupting your office 365 workflow. The 5 applications are Bing Finance for Excel, Bing Maps for Excel, Bing Image Search for Word, Bing News Search for Word and Bing Dictionary for Excel and Word. All apps are available for free via the online Office Store that sells Microsoft Office subscriptions as well as related plugins/ apps.

Bing Finance is a task pane app that allows users to build a finance portfolio table in Excel. Users can input stock symbols and choose to use any data available for the stock like current price, volume, high/ lows etc. The app allows you to refresh the table with latest data values as well as provide additional information like price chart and news for your stocks, all within your Excel sheet.

Bing Maps looks great for anyone working with location data in Excel. It lets user plot any datapoint related to various regions by overlaying the data on a Map. Again, Bing Maps will work with any Excel sheet.

Similarly, Bing Image Search and Bing News Search are great for adding relevant results to your Word documents, while Bing Dictionary aims to provide a ready reference across Word as well as Excel documents.

Microsoft has been trying to provide a lot of innovations around  Office and Bing, and these apps are the latest step in that regard. We can certainly see the Bing Finance and Bing Maps apps coming in pretty handy.