Office Online adds contextual search using Bing
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The Microsoft online office suite, which was already very robust and competent, is even more so as of today thanks to a small avalanche of novelties that it has incorporated. The most notable of these is the integration with Bing through a new tool called Insights for Office
"While when we hear Bing integration we tend to imagine something basic, like a search box embedded in the Ribbon, Insights actually goes a step further, offering us intelligent results depending on the context, in a format similar to search engine answer boxes, thus aiming to deliver information about places, concepts and people in a more condensed way than what we see in the classic lists of results."
This is accomplished using a technology from Microsoft Research developed to identify background patterns in text. For example, if we write Keiko within an essay, Bing should be able to discern whether we are referring to the orca from Free Willy, the former presidential candidate of Peru, or the twelfth emperor of Japan, all depending on the rest of the content. of the document. Even if we use multiple meanings of a word in the same document, Bing promises us to be able to distinguish the contextual meaning of each of them"
Microsoft says Insights is also a better search tool because it reduces distractions by letting you get the information you need without leaving your Office work environment, while if we search for something on Google or Bing we run the risk of coming across a link not linked to our topic but that tempts us to read and wander the web Obviously we can control this by exercising willpower, but it is always an advantage to be able to work in an environment with fewer distractions.
Even so, in the event that Bing makes a mistake interpreting what we are looking for, or that the information presented is insufficient, we can use a More web results button to access organic search results."
There are several ways to invoke Insights. The most convenient of them, in my opinion, is to select the concept to search with the right mouse button, and then select Insights from the context menu. But we can also open this function through a button located in the Review> tab"
Unfortunately, Insights for Office for now can only be used in English and within Word Online, but it is expected to be available soon available in other languages and in other Office applications, such as Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint.We will inform you when this happens.
Other improvements: support for scanned PDFs, better pagination and new Tell Me features
There are currently only 20 symbols available through this tool, but Microsoft promises to add more based on popular demand, for the which has included a feedback option where we can indicate which symbols we miss the most.
Another important novelty is the better support for PDFs with scanned and photographed documents Since before it was possible to open this type of document using the Office Online PDF reader (based on Word) but now it is also possible to select text in them and even convert them into editable Word documents, which is achieved using Office Lens OCR technology.
Of course, we are warned that, for now, this procedure is designed for documents made up mostly of text, such as contracts, letters , and the like, so there could be problems when converting documents with many graphic elements, such as diagrams or presentations, since Word would not be able to preserve the original layout. Perhaps when this function is extended to PowerPoint it will be possible to convert that type of content without problem, as Office Lens already does with whiteboard images.
There are also pagination improvements, since Word now tells us exactly where each page begins and ends, and also incorporates a counter in the status bar that tells us what page we are on, and how many are the total pages of the document. A simple change, but very useful and necessary.
Lastly, a couple of functions have been added to the Tell Me search box The first of these is the ability to query the number of words typed from there (which doesn't seem to be very helpful since this already appears in the bottom left corner), and the second, and more handy, is the box capacity. show us commands and actions of the sub-menus in the list of results, whereas until now only commands that were directly present in the Ribbon were displayed.
"An example of the latter can be seen in the image above, where when searching by A4 size, the command to change the page size to A4 is shown directly, saving us time and clicks. "
What do you think of these improvements? Are there any that will particularly benefit you on a day-to-day basis? What else would you like to see in Office Online?
Via | Paul Thurrott, Bing Blogs
