Alleviating Office feature bloat with text-based search

A common complaint about Microsoft Office is how many features and commands it has. The new “ribbon interface” introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 was designed to help users find their desired command more easily. A prototype feature that was recently shown off let the user type in their intention. It almost works like the good-old command line of DOS or Unix, but with much more flexibility.

This is a keyboard analog of the “virtual intelligence” that would be an ideal interface. Instead of pointing and clicking, many users would like to talk to their computers in a (more or less) natural language and have the computer understand. The command lines of DOS or UNIX are rigid in their syntax, which did not correspond to natural language at all. Being able to type “Insert a picture” in Microsoft Word is much more natural. For that matter, there are many search engines striving to accurately reply to a request like “Give me census data for Illinois in 1997.”

While this will likely help users navigate the confusing Office interface, this screenshot shows just how many features there are. Type “insert” and get 205 command options? Page 1 of 23? This would take an incredibly long time to sort through this many options to find the desired one, which is not the best solution. Nonetheless, Search Commands is a decent first step, though.