Microsoft Bing team has launched a couple of apps for the users of Microsoft Office 365.

These apps use Bing technologies to add functionality to Office applications.

Right now five apps are available:

Bing Maps for Office helps people plot location data on a Bing Map. It a data visualization tool for Excel that lets you use location names and map controls so you can zoom in and out of the map using touch or your mouse. You can adjust the map view to road or birds eye. Imagine overlaying census data on a state map.

Bing Finance (Beta) for Office helps you take control of your finances by letting you build a finance portfolio table in Excel. You can input stock symbols and customize the fields you’d like to display by selecting from a wide range of data columns, including current price and news.

Bing News Search for Office lets you search for news and related videos from within a Word document. Bing search results can be inserted into the document by clicking on the insert plus icon. You can also add frequent searches to your favorites list.

Bing Dictionary (English) for Office continuously discovers and distills high quality language knowledge so you have the latest definitions and spellings available. Aren’t sure of how to spell something? Simply enter words as they sound and Bing can suggest letters, words or phrases, optionally specified by part-of-speech.

Bing Image Search for Office allows you to search for images on the web from within your Word document. You can search for images by selecting text in the document or typing in the search box. Results are displayed in a grid and when you click on a result, a larger preview is displayed at the bottom with additional details and options. Any result can be inserted into the document at the location of your cursor by clicking on the insert plus icon.

As you can see, these are rather similar to functionalities Google offers in their Docs platform.