Using the Tell Me assistant

- There's a new feature here in Word 2016 that deserves it's own movie. It's going to be very helpful to those who are having difficulty navigating Microsoft Word, maybe finding specific commands that they need to use. It's called the Tell Me assistant. You'll see it up here on the ribbon, after the last tab, "tell me what you want to do." Notice the keyboard shortcut is alt + q. Now, if you're following along with me, we closed up all of our files. We don't even have anything open right now. But, we can still make use of the Tell Me assistant. Let's say you are brand new to Microsoft Word, you don't even know how to open up a file.

All you do is you click in here, and type in open. And, you can see right at the top is the open command. So, it's not just showing you, it's actually going to allow you to accomplish the task of opening directly from here. Notice the keyboard shortcut, ctrl + o, so it's teaching you at the same time. Give it a click, and it takes you right to backstage view, with open selected. Let's go to browse and we'll open up Best of Landon Hotel Guide, there we go, click open, and we have our document open.

Now, if you were following along with me, you'll see a bookmark feature, welcoming us back to where we left off, if we wanted to. All we have to do is click this to go right where our cursor was when we closed it up, kind of cool. But, the Tell Me assistant can help us work with many different things. For example, if we scroll down to the second page and select the image of the phone booths, and then go up to the "tell me what you want to do" assistant, let's say I wanted to size this, I could type in size, or start to type in size, and you can see size and position appears, and that's because I've selected an image.

Now, if I hadn't selected it, it wouldn't even see this option. But, let's go to size and position, give it a click, and that opens up the layout dialogue where we can adjust things like the height and width of this if we wanted to. Let's just click cancel, and deselect, we'll just click anywhere down below in the next heading, see and be seen in the West End. Now when you go up here and you type in size, you can see it's totally different, it's choose page size, or font size if you wanted to, things that are related to where your cursor is.

So, if I wanted to change the page size, I could click it from here, and actually make a selection from this drop down, or go to more paper sizes, if I don't see what I want. Let's just click in the background to close up those menus. So, as you're working on your documents, if you're struggling to find the specific command, something you want to do, and you're not sure where to find it, remember, you always have the "tell me what you want to do" option at the top, alt + q, your keyboard shortcut, also known as the Tell Me assistant.