Kelly LaForest (Alumni)
While writing a blog post tonight my mind was drawing a blank on another word for actual. Inspiration comes in waves for me, and being on a roll, I did not want to have to stop the flow to go open the internet browser, go to a thesaurus and look up an alternate word online. Too many steps! Back in the day, in any Office program you could highlight a word and right click with your mouse and mini toolbar would open up a pop-out of options that included dictionary and thesaurus. In 2013 this option went away. And many people complained. I realized today that although it is not there visually, it is actually only a click away still. Here’s what you do:
- Highlight the word.
- Right click with your mouse and select Translate from the mini toolbar.
- The Research pane will pop open on the left side of your screen.
- Click on the dropdown menu under the Search For field to open up your options.
- Select Thesaurus from the list.
I’m actually really thankful that Microsoft took this away. Clutter sucks and I prefer having less options in the mini toolbar for my eye to scan. Because ultimately, if you clicked on translate, dictionary or thesaurus, you’d still be opening the same tool.
Now, to “level up” for all you keyboard shortcut fans who distain using your mouse, here’s an even faster option: highlight the word and press SHIFT+F7
Warning: For any of you fellow Lenovo Yoga users out there, WATCH OUT – our keyboards require you use the Function (“Fn”) key to select F1-F12. I forgot to press Fn before I hit SHIFT + F7 and accidentally turned on airplane mode thereby killing my internet connection. When I went to post this blog post the browser spat out a nasty error message and I went all bug-eyed thinking I just all this content. Yet ANOTHER reason why I need to work smart and write my blog posts in OneNote first, then do the ole’ copy + paste into WordPress.
PS – the word I was looking for was genuine.
Here’s some screenshots for you visual folks:
