Microsoft Office Timesaver: Using the Research Pane

Office 2003 brought us all sorts of pains, not the least of which is the Research task pane. The Research pane hooks into Word, Outlook (when you're using Word to view or write a message, which is the default), Excel, and PowerPoint, and at times it hangs on the left edge of Internet Explorer.

Office 2003's Research pane includes some very powerful tools, including a fully functional version of Microsoft Encarta, 20-minute-delayed stock quotes and historic price charts, a dictionary, and more.

The Research pane also includes a bunch of advertising fluff, designed specifically to convince you to part with your money — in exchange for information that's readily available on the Internet.

As long as you have a reasonably fast Internet connection, using the Research pane is considerably simpler — and possibly faster — than pulling out your old dictionary or encyclopedia and running the lookup manually. The results won't be as thorough as a trip through Google, say, but if you're looking for quick, adequate definitions and explanations, the Research pane is a decent place to start.

Fixing the Research Pane

Right out of the box, the Research pane is a great advertising tool, fully functional and ready to convince you to spend more money. Before you delve into exploring the Research pane and its options quickly and efficiently, you should cut out the advertisements:

1. Start Microsoft Word, and then click the Research icon on the Standard toolbar.

Word brings up the Research task pane.

2. Click Research Options at the bottom of the Research task pane.

Office shows you the Research Options dialog box. The remainder of this procedure helps you decide which Research Options you need, as well as which will only get in your way.

3. If you want Office to suggest translations for individual, common words, keep the Translation check box marked.

If you don't normally use machine translation (or if you're content to work with something like Google's Language Tools, then clear the Translation check box.

When you use the Research pane, the automatic Translation often just gums up the works, reporting that it can't find words that you don't want it to search for anyway.

4. Clear the eLibrary check box — unless you have an ongoing need to be teased by the first hundred words of a million magazine articles.

eLibrary will tell you that it found your Research task pane search item, show you the first few words of each magazine article, and then offer to show you the full articles for a price. This is not worth your time nor your money unless you really need access to the magazines that eLibrary represents exclusively. Use Google News instead.

5. Clear the Factiva Search check box.

If you really want this, go straight to Factiva, which is a joint venture between Dow Jones and Reuters.

6. Seriously consider clearing the MSN Search check box.

This is a personal preference, but why have the Research pane spend time banging against MSN's search engine when, with a couple of clicks and the Google toolbar, you can run against Google's mother lode of information?

7. Click OK.

Leave the Gale Company Profiles and MSN Money Stock Quotes check boxes enabled because they induce little overhead, don't beg incessantly for money, and can actually be useful if you can figure them out.

Finding synonyms

Nine times out of ten, when you're using Word, Outlook, or PowerPoint, you won't need or want to use the Research task pane to look for a synonym. Simply right-click the word, choose Synonyms, and choose from one of the six most-common synonyms (or one antonym) on offer.

• Right-clicking a word to find a synonym is quick and easy. The Research task pane is slow and cumbersome. Why? Because the synonym entries in the right-click menu are all stored on your computer: You can look up a synonym even if you aren't connected to the Internet.

• To save time, don't right-click and choose Look Up. Right-clicking and then choosing Synonyms --> Thesaurus feeds the chosen word directly into Office's Thesaurus, which is already located on your PC. If you choose Look Up, the word you choose goes into the Encarta Dictionary, which is a Web site away.

If you can't get the synonym you want with a simple right-click, choose Thesaurus, and Office brings up the Research task pane. (Note: Excel doesn't offer synonyms in its right-click contextual menu. You have no choice but to use the considerably slower Research task pane — or start Word, type the word, right-click it, and go from there.)

Here's how you drill down in the Thesaurus — which is to say, to find a synonym of a synonym. In the Research pane, click the word that you want to explore. As long as you continue to search in the Thesaurus, Office's response remains snappy.

When you find the synonym you want, click the down-arrow to the right of the word in the Research pane and choose Insert. Your old word is automatically replaced by the new one.

Looking in the dictionary

Although the Office Thesaurus is swift, the other reference book you're likely to use — the Encarta Dictionary — can be sluggish indeed.

Sometimes a quick look at a word's synonyms will confirm immediately whether you have the right word — and avoid a trip to the dictionary. For example, if you aren't quite sure whether the word hirsute means hairy, right-click hirsute and choose Synonyms.

The primary timesaving trick to using the Encarta Dictionary lies in understanding that the dictionary doesn't include many of the terms that you might expect to find in a dictionary. For example, the names of almost all countries, states, cities, rivers, mountains, people, and zillions of additional proper nouns aren't in the dictionary at all. If you look for them in the dictionary, you're just wasting your time.

For example, if you right-click the word thailand and choose Look Up (or hold down the Alt key and click the word — same thing), the Research pane opens, grabs the word thailand, looks it up, sits there for a while — and finds nothing.

If you didn't disable the Translate search service (see Step 3, above), chances are good the Research task pane will get hung up trying to translate the word thailand into French or Spanish! Oy.

The problem? Actually, there are two:

• Office's Research task pane is hard-wired to repeat the same search that it last performed. When you right-click a word and choose Look Up — or hold down the Alt key and left-click a word — the Research pane repeats its previous search by using the new word. If your previous search was a dictionary lookup, you go out to the dictionary again.

• There's no way to tell the Research task pane that you want it to look in both the dictionary and the encyclopedia. You get one or the other but not both.

Compounding the problem is the blasted terminology: Only Microsoft would have the hubris to draw a distinction between Reference Books (which includes the Thesaurus located on your PC and Microsoft's dictionary out on the Web) as opposed to Research Sites (which includes Microsoft's encyclopedia Web site), and prevent you from searching both simultaneously.