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.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1622550,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"C"}']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.
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Today’s news follows Microsoft’s move to kill its clip art image library and redirect Office users to Bing’s image search.
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