Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 3 (section)

== microsoft word 2003 ==

Microsoft Word 2003 and Microsoft Office 2003 has a new feature called the Research Task Pane.  What one does to research a word is press the ALT button while clicking the mouse.  What follows is a tab that opens and if you are on the internet will use Microsoft’s Encarta, Microsoft Dictionary or Microsoft Thesaurus.  Amazon also works with this feature calling up books that might be related to this subject you research.  The problem is the Microsoft Dictionary and Thesaurus are apparently limited in nature.  I prefer to use your service to call up research on a subject and I am sure there are others like me, which would prefer to use your service instead of Microsoft’s service, especially since I consider your site superior.

I know that I can open a web browser and do the copy, paste, but if one is in the middle of writing, it seems move convenient to do it all within your word processor.

From what I understand, the procedure uses a protocol called SOAP and XML, not being a real tech wizard, I am not sure what that means.  I have seen an article about it on http://www.perfectxml.com/Research/default.aspx and www.officezealot.com .  Is it possible that your site could be setup to allow this to happen and research in Office 2003.

Sincerely

Andy Dansby
andydansby@comcast.net
:Andy, I'm no tech whiz, but in my limited experience with Microsoft, I'd say it will be difficult to make an interface with a product of theirs (Word) when we have a product (Wikipedia) in direct competition with another product of theirs (Encarta).  I imagine there are safeguards in Word to prevent us from being patched in like that.  This is pure speculation, I admit -- certainly if something like what you suggest could be made, I'd be second in line (behind you :-) to use it. [[User:Jwrosenzweig|Jwrosenzweig]] 23:50, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

:: I don't know much about the web side of the tech world, but this sounds to me like something that [[Mozilla Firefox]] did with adding search engines to the browser (I think they used XML). Maybe someone with more web-knowledge can look into this further. [[User:Jrdioko|<nowiki></nowiki>]] &nbsp;&ndash; [[User:Jrdioko|Jrdioko]] [[User talk:Jrdioko|<small>(Talk)</small>]] 00:03, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

::: I had a look on [[Microsoft Developer Network|MSDN]], and turned up a technical introduction [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/odc_customizingtheresearchpane.asp] and a couple of tutorials [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnofftalk/html/office03062003.asp] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnofftalk/html/office03062003.asp] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/rssdk/html/rsResearchWS.asp]. And no, quite the opposite from locking out competitors, they're just dying for people to write "web services" with all their lovely .NET tools - and of course, make Office nicer to use, which also gets them money. I don't know how easy it is to use [[SOAP]], but I imagine it can't be too complex (and I'm sure there are [[Free Software|Free]] tools to help). Perhaps this should be logged as a [https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=411195&group_id=34373&func=browse feature request]... - [[User:IMSoP|IMSoP]] 12:53, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)