The Research Pane in Microsoft Word is designed to help you find information from research books or internet research sites. For example, the Research Pane has a dictionary, a thesaurus, a translation dictionary, an encyclopedia and other reference resources.
Although we’ll be showing you how use the Research Pane in Word 2007, it’s available in previous versions of Word as well.
To get started, just highlight a word and right click it. From the menu that appears, select “Look Up” as follows:
The Research Pane appears on the right side of the document. It uses the highlighted word and display results from the encyclopedia and thesaurus.
There are several options on this pane; you can limit the results to just one reference source or you can perform additional actions. For instance, a drop down menu appears when you select a synonym allowing you to quickly insert the word in your document. You can also quickly look up the word in the dictionary.
Another convenient feature is the translation module shown below:
The selected word will appear translated at the bottom. If you want, you can click the green arrow and translate the entire document from one language into another. Just change the “From” and “To” languages as needed.
If needed, you can add or remove research resources by clicking on the Research options link at the bottom of the pane. This allows you to add a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia in another language. You can also add search or financial sites.
If the Research Pane doesn’t work on your computer, give us a call.
