The “Tell me what you want to do” feature in Office 2016

There’s no question that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook have a ton of functionality. However, sometimes it’s nearly impossible to remember or find the right menu option to trigger it. In Office 2016, there’s a new feature called Tell me what you want to do. It is a lifesaver in finding what you need to know when you need to know it.

In Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook (but not OneNote), you’ll see the lightbulb and the Tell me what you want to do option at the end of the menu options on the Ribbon Bar:

Place your cursor in the field and type in what you want to do. In this example, I typed make a table, pretending I didn’t know where to go to do that. You’ll see a number of menu options that are related to that query, along with an option to get help on the topic:

I love how they’ve incorporated natural language search into the Help feature in Office. It’s now much more likely you’ll be able to find answers to your own questions without having to be a search guru.