Carol's Corner Office

This tip can be useful to everyone who uses MS Office but it is particularly useful to those in the legal and financial profession, as well as those in academia.

The the MS Word feature I am referring to was added in version 2003 and has been hailed as one of the best features yet by many. The feature is the Research task pane. The following services are available from the research task pane:

• Dictionary – Will look up words or phrases in the MS Encarta English dictionary while you work
• Thesaurus – Looks up synonyms while you work and insert them into your document directly from the Research task pane.
• Encyclopedia – Research your subject using the Encarta Encyclopedia which contains over 42,000 articles.
• Translation – Get translations quickly and easily using bilingual dictionaries on your computer and online.
• Company Information – Look up company information where you work. You can insert company information and perform custom actions.
• Comprehensive company information is provided by Gale, a company profile service provider.
• Third- party services – you can add third party premium content to your list of research services, such as Factiva (news), eLibrary (news and periodicals), WordLingo (translation provider), Hoovers (financial information),and LexisNexis (legal research).
• Web search – Searches the Web along side your document using MSN search.

Many of my law office subscribers didn’t know about using LexisNexis in the Research pane in MS Word. It’s pretty cool though once they get the hang of it. Say you have a legal memorandum and you have to check your case cites, you simply highlight it and right-click and select Lookup and then use the drop-down arrow to select LexisNexis and it does all the work for you.

It is pretty simple to add the third resources to the Research task pane. Follow the steps below to learn how:

1. Open the task pane by clicking on Tools | Research.

Your should now see Research options hyperlink at the bottom of the pane.

1. Click on the hyperlink to bring up a dialog box.

1. Click the Add Services button.

1. Enter the URL of the service you are installing.
2. Click the Add button to continue.
3. Click the Install button in the dialog box.
4. Follow the prompts until the conclusion.

In my opinion, this is a great feature and I think you will come to that conclusion as well.