My project description


In the summer of 2021, I worked as an Explore intern with Microsoft Excel. The Explore internship combines Project management and software development, where a pod of three first or second-year college students gain end-to-end experience developing a product. My internship project was to add a feature that enables Excel Desktop customers to open their workbooks in Excel Online.

In the Product Management phase, I interviewed six General Excel customers and eight product managers who work on features available in Excel online only. The interview aimed at understanding the customer pain points and scenarios when a customer would use our feature. After the interviews, I developed prototype designs using Figma and wrote a product specification for the project. In my fifth week of the internship, I organized a review session where six Product managers and my team’s mentors critiqued our product specification and suggested possible improvements before approving the sample designs for production.

In my sixth week, I started the development phase where I used C++ to add the open in browser functionality that obtained the workbook’s SharePoint Url and launched a web session with that Url. After accomplishing this task, I maintained the data context of the customer’s workbook when they use our feature. Data context refers to Excl Online opening the exact cell location the user was working in before using our feature. To achieve this, I added a new navigation type that supported deep linking to the specific sheet and cell when a user opens their workbook in Excel Online.

At the end of the internship, I presented the Open In Browser functionality to two hundred full-time and intern engineers in Microsoft Excel.

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