Despite Microsoft Senior VP Chris Capossela saying that a search interface for the new Office ribbon device was unnecessary, Microsoft Office Labs yesterday released the internal project called ‘Scout’, now given the far less interesting title ‘Search Commands’.  What is it with Microsoft having cool development names and then giving the products really boring release titles?

Anyway, the plugin adds another tab to Word, Powerpoint & Excel.  It’s added as the last tab, but helpfully, you can just click ‘Windows Key + Y’ and it will jump to the search box from the application. 

All it really is is a search box, a bunch of suggestions plus a gigantic help button. It is very useful though.  Just start typing in the box and it will come up with a list of commands related to what you’ve typed in.  It starts with partial matches and narrows down as you type.  What is particularly handy is that it isn’t just doing a text match on the name of the commands, it’s doing a contextual match too.  The example given in the help tutorial is that if you enter ‘background’ it comes up with a bunch of commands related to document backgrounds (in Word).  This includes things like Watermarks, changing themes and shading.  I’m not sure how this is done, there must be some sort of categorisation for the application’s commands behind the scenes.

There are a couple of other little features that make this tool really good too.  There is a suggestion box that comes up when you enter text that has no matching commands:

Also, all the search results have numbers next to them as keyboard shortcuts, so you don’t need to use the mouse at all if you’re quick.

If there are more than 9 matching commands, it will paginate the results & previous and next buttons will activate next to the results.  For some reason these buttons don’t have keyboard shortcuts, which is a little bit annoying, but not a big deal.

The ‘Guided Help’ is a rather fancy help tool that pops up this lightbox-esqu box that steps through a tutorial on how to use the Search Commands.  It’s  probably worth running through once.

One thing it pointed out that I didn’t realise is that the Search Commands plugin ads a bunch of other ‘Guided Help’ tutorials.  Type ‘guided help’ into the search box & they’ll all come up.  They will run through things like embedding fonts, changing styles, inserting pictures & so on.  Also they will actually perform these tasks on the document you’re in. 

One odd thing I did notice is that in Word & Powerpoint the search box does as-you-type refining of the search results, where as in Excel it doesn’t search until you click enter (or the search button next to the text box).  Not sure why this is, maybe it’s a limitation of Excel due to the massive number of commands available.

A bit annoyingly, the guided help boxes steal focus from the OS.  You can’t Alt-Tab to any other application or even minimise all to get the desktop back while the tutorial is running.

Despite that, it’s a great plugin, and I don’t know why it wasn’t rolled into the initial application.  I really think it would have reduced the resistance to the new ribbon interface.  This search commands tool makes it even easier to find things, plus it can help you find features you didn’t know existed (via the contextual search it does).  Grab it from the Office Labs site.