Everybody’s favorite Microsoft internal-use-only-no-you-can’t-have Office 2007 powertoy, “Search Commands” (codename “Scout”), made an unexpected appearance on the IEBlog today hiding in a list of installed applications.
Jane Maliouta, program manager for IE8 deployment, was outlining the process to uninstall IE8 when she posted a screenshot of her “Add or remove programs” dialog presumably taken from her work computer. One of the applications installed was “Search Commands from Microsoft Office Labs”.
For those who are not familiar with Search Commands, it is an add-in for Office 2007 which adds the ability to quickly find and use Office commands straight from the Ribbon in a find-as-you-type process.
For example, you could type “pictur” and it will return a list of the 9 most relevant commands in Word that contain the word “pictur” such as “Copy picture” or “Insert picture from file”. From there, each command is numbered from 1 to 9 for quick access via the keyboard.
As you would imagine, this functionality would be very popular with power users and even help bridge the gap between traditional Office users and the new Ribbon interface.
Currently it is only available to Microsoft employees because it was
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