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| Figure 1: The Research Library is available from the task pane. |
icrosoft Office 2003 Editions add a powerful new tool to the Office task pane: the Research Library.By default, the Research Library allows you to type in a word or phrase and search for the term using several built-in resources. The Research Library is also extensible: you can add your own research service simply by creating a Web service that follows schemas defined by Microsoft for research services.
In this article, you'll look at the nuts and bolts of the Research Library and see how you can use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to create your own research service. If you are new to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), you will become familiar with some of the coding techniques needed to create research services in VB.NET. You'll also learn how to use various formatting tags to change the appearance of the result and how to provide a custom search form for your research service.
Working with the Research Library in the Task Pane
The Research Library is available from the task pane in Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. You can display the Research task pane by selecting
Research from the
Tools menu, or by pressing
Ctrl+F1 and choosing
Research from the
Other Task Panes drop-down list. As you can see in
Figure 1, the Research task pane provides a text box for you to enter the word or phrase on which to search, a drop-down list where you can choose to limit the search to a single resource, and an area for displaying the results.
Figure 1 shows the Research task pane after the user has queried the thesaurus for a particular word; the user could have selected any of the resources shown in
Figure 2 or searched all resources for the same term. You can customize the Research task pane to show other resources by clicking
Research Options at the bottom of the pane. The Research Options dialog box, shown in
Figure 3, lists additional resources. These resources are mostly international versions of the default resources. Although these resources may be useful, they are not as intriguing as the command button in the bottom left-hand corner of the dialog box: the
Add Services button. It's this button that separates the Research Library from other useful features available in interactive Office 2003.
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| Figure 2: The Research Library includes several built-in and online resources by default. |
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| Figure 3: Office 2003 provides a long list of choices for customizing the Research task pane's list of resources. |
The ability to add services means that developers can create research services of their own for end users to use in Excel 2003, Word 2003, or PowerPoint 2003. A custom research service could provide a way for users to query corporate data, or it could be a front-end to a publicly available service such as
Google's Web APIs.
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