Microsoft plans to announce a boatload of new capabilities to Office, search, and Edge at its Ignite conference Monday, including rollout plans for its Chromium-based Edge browser, a tool to read your email aloud in the Outlook app, corporate insights driven by Microsoft Search, and more. But subtle improvements like natural-language queries in Excel may prove more significant.

Microsoft has arguably struggled to align search and the web with its traditional Office silos of spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. Now, executives say they’ve cracked the problem. 

Microsoft hasn’t lost its idealistic view of the Internet, dating back to Internet Explorer’s “beauty of the Web” campaign. But today, the web provides more opportunities and more challenges to solve, said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president in charge of Microsoft’s Modern Life & Devices Group, in advance of Ignite. Mehdi recounted the problems Microsoft was trying to solve: How do you protect privacy and still maintain personalization? How do businesses bring together the web and their own knowledge into a cohesive whole? How does Microsoft apply its own tools, like Edge and Bing, to those goals? 

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