Microsoft collects some information while using its service to help you save time and produce better results. It mainly uses this information to perform a behavioral analysis and interpret a user’s responses. Based on it, the company offers features in its services that help you improve response times, maintain accuracy, ensure consistency, and optimize outcomes. It classifies all such features under one heading – Intelligent Services.
What are Microsoft Office Intelligent Services
Some of the features that rely on Intelligent Services include-
- Office Tell Me – a text field where you can enter words and phrases about what you want to do next and quickly get to actions you want to perform.
- Office Dictate – It saves you the efforts of typing. Just talk to dictate words (you need to have your microphone turned on)
- Editor – It helps you improve your writing in Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint by identifying words and phrases that might need more polish.
- Word Editor – Marks issues with red, blue, or gold underlining for spelling, grammar, and stylistic issues, respectively. Moreover, it suggests you either learn more about the error or find a way to correct it right away.
- Translator – Word can translate selected words, phrases, or entire documents to or from 60 different languages.
- Smart Lookup – If you come across a word or a phrase that’s new to you, right-click it and select ‘Smart Lookup’. The feature opens an insights pane where you can find its definitions, Wikipedia articles, and top related searches from the web.
- Auto Alt Text – Office can help make your documents, emails, and presentations more accessible to people using screen readers by suggesting alt text for your images.
- PowerPoint Designer – automatically generates design ideas to choose from and works in the background to match the content to professionally designed layouts.
- PowerPoint QuickStarter – builds an outline to help you get started researching a subject of your choosing.
- Ideas in Excel – It empowers you to understand your data through high-level visual summaries, trends, and patterns.
As you may have guessed by now, all these features are a part of the Office suite (Office 365 subscription). As such, they bring the power of the Cloud to Microsoft Office apps. However, Intelligent Services are not enabled by default. You need to enable them manually.
How to enable or disable Microsoft Office Intelligent Services
Open an Office app like Word, PowerPoint or Excel and choose the ‘File’ tab.
Next, choose ‘Options’ from the list that appears in the left column.
Scroll down to ‘Office Intelligent Services’ section and check the box marked against ‘Enable services’ option.
When done, hit the ‘OK’ button and exit. You have now enabled the Intelligent Services. If you want to disable the same, simply follow the above procedure again and uncheck the ‘Enable services’ option.
Read next: Six ways you can legally use Microsoft Office without paying for it.
