How will the future "Tell Me" assistant in Office 16 work? The answer is already in Office Online

Some of a stir was caused today by the alleged leaked screenshots of Office 16, the next version of Microsoft's office suite. These images show changes such as the inclusion of a dark visual theme (in addition to the current white, light gray, and dark gray), and the ability to automatically rotate photos to their correct orientation.

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But the feature that has most caught the attention of many is the supposed return of the wizard Clippy, who would return in the form of tokens, becoming a search box called Tell Me from which we can ask for suggestions on how to perform tasks or actions within Office."

However, if we want to know from now on the details of how this wizard will work, it is not necessary to wait for the release of a preview or Beta version of Office 16, because Tell Me is now available in the web version of Office (and also in its iPad client). To use it, we simply have to open a Word document in editing mode, and write something in the box that will appear above Ribbon, in the center of the screen.

The Tell Me wizard will be very useful for everyone who hasn't quite gotten used to the Ribbon interface. "

A virtue of this box-wizard is that it supports natural language queries Also, unlike Clippy in Office 97, the results it returns are not help articles or tutorials, but rather shortcuts to the specific commands we need to use to do what we want. For example, when we ask Tell Me how to increase the font size, it will immediately show us the menu to change the text size, without even having to go to the Ribbon tab where this option is found."

The latter implies that Tell Me will be very useful for all those who are not quite used to the Ribbon interface, since it will fulfill the role of function launcher, allowing execute Office functions without us having to remember the specific tab of the Ribbon in which they are located

As we see, the Tell Me assistant will be an outlier of a feature that is rolled out to Office Online first and then brought to its desktop peer, rather than the other way around. On the other hand, it is expected that when implemented in Office 16, those from Redmond add extra features that give it greater power One possibility is that Tell Me incorporates Cortana-style voice recognition, or even integrated with the Windows 9 voice assistant, making it even easier to work with documents. Although of course, the latter is just speculation, and we will have to wait for future leaks to see if such functions are present or not.

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