Researching While You Work

How many times during a typical workday do you stop and look up something you need in order to continue? It might be a product number, the spelling of a name , or the date and time of an important event. Now you can do your research without leaving your Word application (this feature is available in Excel and PowerPoint, too). Here are the steps:

1. Choose Research from the Tools menu.

2. In the Research task pane (see Figure 3-5), type your word in the Search box and click the green Start Searching button.

   
   Figure 3-5: The Research task pane makes it possible for you to find what you need without interrupting your work.

Aha! ”Fast Research

You can research a word even faster by pressing Alt and clicking the word in your document. Word will open the Research task pane automatically and display the results of the search.

 

The Research task pane then displays the results of the nearly instant search of both online and offline resources. When you re offline, Word searches the available thesaurus and dictionary information; but when you re online, your search will produce results from a wide variety of online information services (click the All Other Services down arrow to see a list of resources). You can customize the research sites list by clicking Research options and adding, updating, removing, or specifying parental controls for different sources.