From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Use Microsoft Search to quickly find anything in Office

From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Use Microsoft Search to quickly find anything in Office

- [Instructor] When learning to use the apps in Microsoft Office, it can sometimes take a little time to find the features and tools needed for your work. But at the top of each Office app, you'll find the search bar. In some applications, a search bar like this often lets you look up instructions on how to accomplish tasks or locate the features you need. But the Microsoft search field goes a step further by giving direct access to the features you need without having to hunt through the tabs in the ribbon or in the menu bar. For example, I'm currently working in this Word document and maybe I want to look up how to adjust the size of margins on the page. So I'll click in the search field and type margins. So at the bottom, I can see that it searched my document for the word margins in case that's what I'm looking for, and there are no results there. Above that, I can roll my mouse over the Get Help On section to read entries about where to go in Word to adjust margins. There's even a dictionary definition of margins here, but what I'm really interested in is this Best Action area at the top. This actually gives me access to the settings to adjust the margins right from here. I don't need to hunt around anywhere else in Word, I can just select, say, the Narrow setting and that adjustment is instantly made to my document. Or maybe I want to adjust the space between paragraphs. I'll select my text here and in the search field, I'll type spacing. Again, under Best Action, Word is offering access to what it thinks are the settings I most likely want, in this case line and paragraph spacing. But you may find other suggestions under Actions, and here's the paragraph spacing I want. That opens the correct window for me, where I can find the paragraph spacing settings, make some changes and click Okay. So the Microsoft search bar is a great tool to turn to anytime there's a feature you can't find, or you're not sure how to accomplish a task. Just type in what you're looking for, check the actions that it lists and make your adjustments from there.

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