<p>Say what you will about Microsoft Office 365, but it's actually turning into a pretty good place to analyze data. The latest improvements, which the company announced on Wednesday, include natural language search and improved geocoding capabilities.</p><p>Much of the new goodness is part of Microsoft's Power BI service, a collaboration and visualization platform that's delivered via Excel and is still in a limited preview mode. As the video below shows, PowerBI's new natural language search capability lets users ask for data in an intuitive manner, and even specify how they'd like to see it displayed. As a user types, different data and visualizations pop up based on what they've entered.</p><p>Microsoft has also added a bunch of small updates to its GeoFlow feature, which we covered in April and which Microsoft is now calling Power Map. It's a Power BI add-on that automatically geocodes and displays geospatial and temporal data in 3-D using Bing Maps. One of its bigger highlights is the ability to create "interactive tours" that show how the data evolve over time and place.</p><p>The company's other big Power BI improvement on Wednesday is an expanded set of sources and capabilities for Power Query, a feature for finding, cleaning and merging datasets. The most unique thing about Power Query, to me, is that it helps users find datasets from external sources such as Data.gov, the Windows Azure Marketplace and Wikipedia.</p><p><a href="http://gigaom.com/2013/09/25/microsoft-could-be-making-office-365-a-great-place-to-analyze-data/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/cloud-computing/3470716/microsoft-sharpens-office-365-tool-to-slice-and-dice-data/">Microsoft sharpens Office 365 tool to slice and dice data</a> (ComputerworldUK)</p><p><a href="http://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/09/25/preview-of-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx">Microsoft Updates Preview of Power BI for Office 365</a> (Redmondmag.com)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dAzIgb5aupHIRAMRs7HoybpdgHRBM&ned=us">9 additional articles.</a></p>