Office 365 Things You Need To Know: Tell me what you want to do…

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Rob Waggoner

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Every time we release a new version of Office, we optimize the user interface.  Have you ever wanted the ability to ask Office “How do I do something?”.  Well that’s what Tell me, included in Office 2016, will give you.  Below, I’ll show you the user experience for Excel, Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, but my best advice is to try it out yourself.  It has already been useful to me.  Here are a few examples from four of the office components. 

In Excel, I asked, How do I analyze… and the drop down gave me suggestions on what you are trying to accomplish, including “What-if Analysis”.

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In Word, I can ask How do I fix my table and it gives me a lot of the table controls.

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Here is one of those things I always want to do, but could never find an easy way to do it, until Office 2016.  How do I easily watermark a document?  If I type water it gives me the Watermark option, that expands into examples of Watermarks.  Now, after typing “water”, I can just choose the layout of my watermark.

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In Outlook, every now and then we need to setup our auto-replies, but do you remember how to do it?  I just asked Tell Me How do I change replies and it shows me where to go. 

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I spend a lot of time in PowerPoint, so anything that makes my life easier is appreciated.  Here I asked Tell Me to help me change the colors of my slide deck.  Something I have to do from time to time when I pull slides from multiple sources. 

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To me, Tell Me gives me the opportunity to ask for help, by asking a simple question without having to search through a lot of help screens to find what I’m looking for.  It’s contextually aware and quickly gives me suggestions based on what I type, as I type it.

Thanks for reading and remember to check out the rest of the Office 365 Things You Need To Knowblog series happening this month!

Until next time,

 

Rob

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