With every round of major updates to the Microsoft Office suite, there's a whole slew of new tips and tricks. Sometimes, they come at you so thick and fast it's hard to keep up.

Even people who thought they knew every trick in the book will occasionally stumble across a new feature that they were previously unaware of. Here are three amazing Excel 2016 tricks you definitely (ok, probably) overlooked.

1. Tell Me How to...

Excel is a sprawling behemoth of an app. Sometimes you'll see a shared file at work, at college, or online, and can't believe it was made using a spreadsheet app. How can you, an Excel noob, hope to achieve such impressive outputs?

The answer is simple: make use of the Tell Me box.

It'll save you searching through the Ribbon for hours, and will even keep a list of previous tasks you've searched for. You find the box above the Ribbon. Just start typing your query to find results.

2. Smart Lookup

When you're trying to do research while working in Excel, the need to constantly change windows can be annoying. Sure, it may not matter if you're on a 40-inch screen, but it's incredibly frustrating for laptop users.

To look up information from within Excel, right-click on a populated cell and choose Smart Lookup from the context menu. On the right-hand side of the app, you will see a list of search results from Bing, including definitions and Wikipedia entries.

3. Brand New Charts

The ability to make graphs in Excel is nothing new, but did you know the 2016 release included six new chart types?

  1. Treemap (hierarchical data views)
  2. Sunburst (a multi-level pie chart)
  3. Waterfall (for visualizing financial statements)
  4. Histogram (shows frequencies within a data set)
  5. Pareto (a histogram that uses bar charts and line graphs)
  6. Box and Whisker (displays quartiles on a histogram)

What are your favorite features in Excel 2016? Let us know in the comments below.