With Insights for Office, Microsoft brings Bing search inside your online docs

Today Microsoft announced the launch of Insights for Office, a fancy name for something quite simple: your documents online now have Bing search built-in.

The new feature may help you when you’re writing and need to do a bit of extra research. Say you’re working on a report about Abraham Lincoln and need to learn when he was born, Microsoft says. If you highlight Lincoln, right-click, and select Insights, a side bar will appear with information via Bing and Wikipedia.

The efficiency of performing actual research inside a Word document is questionable, of course, but perhaps the feature could be useful for simple queries?

According to Microsoft, it’s not just a search tool. Insights for Office is apparently able to detect which Lincoln you’re talking about (the president versus the car company) based on the context in your document. Fancy that.

Today’s news follows Microsoft’s move to kill its clip art image library and redirect Office users to Bing’s image search.