New Office 2007 add-on makes commands easier to find
Microsoft claims that Office 2007's ribbon interface saves time by putting the features people use most often closer at hand. For those of us who spent years learning where those functions were in previous versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the changes aren't the productivity boosters Microsoft envisioned.
I've done more than my share of rummaging around the ribbon in Office 2007 trying to find a particular command, and I've even used Microsoft's user-interface guides to hunt down the feature I needed. Now Microsoft Office Labs has developed the free Search Commands add-on for Office 2007 that lets you type in a command and access it in an instant.
After you download and install the add-on, the Search Commands tab is added to the ribbon. Click it (or press the Windows key and Y) and type the name of the command you need.
For example, the other day I was looking for the Reveal Formatting option in Word 2007. I eventually found it under the Display tab in Word Options (off the Office button menu). It would've been much faster for me to simply open Search Commands, type "reveal formatting," and enter the number that appears next to that option ("5" in this case).
The free Search Commands add-on for Office 2007 makes finding options almost instantaneous.
(Credit: Microsoft)Office Labs' only other offering to date is the Community Clips add-on designed to facilitate finding and sharing how-to videos relating to Office 2007. The site describes three other projects: one that creates a wiki on a SharePoint server, one that is intended to improve the Tablet PC pen interface, and one designed to serve as a marketplace for freelancers.
Note that all of the projects are prototypes, and Microsoft collects "usage metrics" in an attempt to enhance them, though you can opt out of sending any data to the company. I don't know about the other Office Labs projects, but Search Commands is an add-on I expect will save me quite a bit of time by slicing the ribbon to ribbons.
Dennis O'Reilly has covered PCs and other technologies in print and online since 1985. Along with more than a decade as editor for Ziff-Davis's Computer Select, Dennis edited PC World's award-winning Here's How section for more than seven years. He is a member of the CNET blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. 
Actually, I don't.
Rather than admitting that they've made a change to the Office XP/2003 UI that tens of millions learned to use effectively, MS decided that they'd tell the users that there was now a whole new way of interacting with their Office applications. So, for the millions, like me, who've had to "upgrade" (as if!) to 2007 when buying a new PC, productivity is actually diminished as I have to stop and search for the menu options that used to be right where I expected them.
And now we have this "Search Commands" add-in that adds yet another complication and delay in doing something as simple as changing the case of text, for instance. The user has to stop, call up the search commands feature, figure out what to call the command they want to use, and hope for the best.
Why do you suppose MS refuses to admit that their extensive development of this new version of Office was founded on a faulty premise? Gee, I wonder. It couldn't be that it would make them look like the bullies they are, could it? Or incompetent. One or the other.