Office 2016’s Smart Lookup is the next-best thing to a personal research assistant
www.office.com/setup Blogs: Use this helpful feature to quickly verify facts and find additional information as you work.
www.office.com/setup Blogs: Among all of Office 2016's useful new features, there’s one in particular you’ll definitely want to take the time to master: Smart Lookup. In short, it serves as a digital research assistant, pulling in information from the Web to enhance your work or help you decipher unfamiliar content. If you’re an Office regular, Smart Lookup holds the key to a more powerful workflow.
Where to find it
Smart Lookup is just one right-click away in any Office 2016 app. Highlight a word or phrase you want to research, right-click, and select Smart Lookup from the context menu. You can also get to this feature by launching Review > Smart Lookup and entering a query.
Smart Lookup proves its value in many scenarios. Here are some examples.
Be a word nerd
Living up to its name, Smart Lookup will find a definition, synonyms, and the parts of speech for any word you highlight.
Pull in research from the web
The most useful feature for me on a day-to-day basis is Smart Lookup's ability to do a quick web search from within Office.
You still might need to leap over to the browser, as clicking one of the links will take you there. But Smart Lookup is a good way to get started before you succumb to opening 20 different tabs.
Bring some smarts to your spreadsheets
Smart Lookup isn’t useful just for writing and editing. With Excel, you can use Smart Lookup to define an unfamiliar term you encounter in a spreadsheet.
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Smart Lookup should get even smarter
As helpful as it is right now, Smart Lookup could improve over time. Microsoft need look no further than its bitter productivity rival, Google, for ways to enhance the tool.
For example, Google Docs' research tool will insert quoted text from the Web into a document, automatically formatting it and creating a footnote citation. That's a major boon if you’re doing a research paper that requires APA or MLA formatting. Google’s research tool also lets you highlight text and instantly turn it into a link—rather invaluable if you do any writing for the web.
Smart Lookup's already transforming Office workflow today. We can't wait to see what other superpowers it develops in the future.