Excel Add-In for Bing Search

Not long ago we told you about a Bing plugin for Word 2013 that adds a rather nice helper for your writing. Not only a dictionary, but also help with Thesaurus type things, along with a few other minor features. But Bing does a lot more for Office 2013 than just improve your writing.

The service also runs a very solid mapping operation, which it has also turned into an extension, this time for Excel 2013. If you are running any older version of Office then you won’t be able to use this.

To grab the Bing Maps plugin you’ll need to head to the Office Store. The add-on is free to download and install. Once you’ve grabbed it, there are a couple of simple steps to follow to integrate the service into your spreadsheet app.

The Bing Maps add-in can be utilized to show locations on a map with corresponding attributes that describe those locations. Additionally, locations can be visually distinguished by their numeric attributes with varying sizes of location markers.

For example, If you have a business in three different countries, you can easily create a Bing Map in Excel to plot a marker for each location where the sizes of the markers will display in different sizes. The varying sizes can be based on the revenue or some other numeric figure to show how each location varies from the other.

Next, we’ll look at the steps used to insert a Bing Map into an Excel spreadsheet.

Insert the Map

To insert a Bing Map, first click on the insert tab, then click on the Bing Maps add-in button from the add-ins section of the ribbon. The button is hard to miss because it looks like the Bing logo.`