Comments on: Search Commands now available from Office Labs

By: Pascal

Pascal — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00:41 +0000

Can I use this (after installed with admin account) when I m logged in with other user name ?

By: Aravind

Aravind — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:22:53 +0000

Thanks for the blog post on Search Commands, and to all of you who tried it out. I was the Dev Lead on Search Commands, and I’ve written a post on why we built it, and I plan to share more of our designs and how it works in the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in the vision for Search Commands, you might find this post interesting.

http://www.officelabs.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=28

By: Microsoft2 » Blog Archive » Can Microsoft learn to innovate?

Microsoft2 » Blog Archive » Can Microsoft learn to innovate? — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:26:23 +0000

[...] Labs.” One of the first Office Labs projects to see the official light of day is ”Search Commands,” a tool that was codenamed “Scout” — an add-in for navigating more easily Office 2007’s new Ribbon [...]

By: WPF/Silverlight/XAML Web News - 2008/05/09 - Rob Relyea - Xamlified

WPF/Silverlight/XAML Web News - 2008/05/09 - Rob Relyea - Xamlified — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:41:43 +0000

[...] Search Commands now available from Office Labs. I had heard about this powertoy to make it easier to find commands in Ribbon based office [...]

By: Project

Project — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:00:46 +0000

@Kronos if you click on Help in any Mac app you get a different search box that let’s you search by command. Selecting on a result Shows you where in the menbar it can be found and clicking the result launches that command.

By: Quikboy

Quikboy — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:00:28 +0000

@AndrewMcG : Well couldn’t they make Guided Help to work with every new such Update? How hard could it be? Microsoft should consider enabling that feature in the next Windows, because I thought it was pretty neat. Instant help, that can practically do it on it’s own.

That would have been another compelling feature to go with Vista.

By: JamesFi

JamesFi — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:43:03 +0000

@_||_

Andrew knows (and has already talked about) the reasons Vista Guided Help content was turned off (although I believe that they just needed to be more judicious about when they needed to retest). It’s funny how often people are convinced that Guided Help is WPF. Even some folks here at Microsoft continue to erroneously state that it is WPF. I take it as a compliment – thanks. That also probably explains why _||_ thought that it was in WPF. (I’m no longer working on Guided Help – I moved over to work on virtualization on the Virtual Machine Manager team.)

It’s *great* to see Scout finally out and about. Hope everyone enjoys it!

By: AndrewMcG

AndrewMcG — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:59:32 +0000

@ _||_

Just a correction on why Guided Help doesn’t appear in the final release of Vista. (How do I know? I was the program manager for Guided Help, working for Microsoft at the time).
Guided Help wasn’t actually written using WPF – it’s all standard Windows stuff. So it’s not that the binary is too ‘heavy’ – it’s actually installed in your Vista build, even today (the binary is activecontentwizard.dll).
The reason the Windows help team decided to turn off the Guided Help content was simply one of regression testing – it became too difficult to always be testing that Guided Help content didn’t break as a result of each new Update.
Also, the fact that Guided Help content is ‘expanding’ is OK, since it’s help content, and that resides online. There are new help topics for Vista going live all the time.

Congratulations to the Scout team on getting this feature shipped. It’s great that it’s finally seeing light of day.

By: kronos

kronos — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:28:48 +0000

@Project: I thought Spotlight only indexed files? Search Commands lets you find commands/actions.

By: Project

Project — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:12:11 +0000

Might be worth noting that Office 2008 gets similar functionality for free as part of the system wide spotlight help in Leopard. It’s very useful.