Microsoft Launches New Features to Make 'Work From Home' Easier and Faster: Check Details

As Work from home (WFH) has become the new normal amid the pandemic, working professionals are looking for ways to increase productivity and save time. With work from home crisis, the work pressure has also increased. 

As a sigh of relief, Microsoft Word, which is one of the most popular word processing tools and extensively used all the time. They have introduced a number of features to format a text file or documents faster and easier. 

According to a Money Control report below are the five Microsoft Word features that can make working from home easier:

1. Dictate in Word: This new feature helps you to save time and make work significantly easier. Before you start using the Dictate feature on Microsoft Word, make sure to turn on your microphone, and test to see if it is functioning properly. Meanwhile, if you don’t know how to test the microphone of the device: select the Windows Start button, then select Settings > Time & Language > Speech. With this procedure, you can set up your microphone by selecting the Get started button. 

2. Transcribe tool: This new tool works with recorded audio and live speaking, it can also detect different speakers. This new feature allows you to pull quotes from the transcription and place them as you want into the document. You can also start a new transcription, but keep in mind that it’ll erase the one you currently have.

3. Smart Lookup and Researcher: With work from home crisis, this Microsoft Word feature will automatically find information on the Web without forcing users to open up an Internet browser and run a search manually. In just a few steps, researcher in Microsoft Word will help you find and incorporate reliable sources and content for your paper. 

To enable this feature, click on “Tell me what you want to do…” in the ribbon menu at the top and select Smart Lookup. After enabling the feature, simply select a word or phrase in your document, right-click it, and choose Smart Lookup. 

4. Editor in Word: While working on any document you can check your spelling and grammar with Editor in Word. This new feature will not only check the spelling but will also check for over 65 grammar issues and refinements, including hyphenation, passive voice, Oxford comma. So, to enable this feature, you would need to choose to include grammar from the Word Options dialog box (File > Options > Proofing > Check grammar with spelling). 

5. Save documents on the cloud: With the help of this new feature, Microsoft allows you to save your documents on the cloud to protect against device loss or damage and to provide anywhere access to files. So when you go to save a document, the dialogue box will default to OneDrive or SharePoint Online and with the document open in an Office program, click File > Save As > OneDrive.

These are the new features which will help you to work faster and easier.