Office XP Tips: Smart Tags, a Cool, Controversial Feature

Attention antitrust lawyers, conspiracy theorists, Macintosh zealots, and Microsoft haters of every stripe: I am about to make a highly controversial statement. Please sedate yourself appropriately before reading on. Go ahead, the rest of us will wait... OK, everybody properly medicated? I like Smart Tags, a useful but potentially invasive new technology from Microsoft.

Here's the skinny: Word 2002 and Excel 2002 have the ability to recognize certain types of text, such as proper names, dates, times, phone numbers, and so on. When Word or Excel recognizes one of those items, it flags it inconspicuously and offers various helpful tasks via a pop-up menu. Microsoft calls this feature Smart Tags. The pop-up menus offer commands that let you perform tasks such as starting an e-mail message, scheduling a meeting, or generating a Web map for a specific street address.

Microsoft gave Smart Tags a bad name by threatening to extend the technology to Internet Explorer. Unlike Office XP Smart Tags, IE Smart Tags would have highlighted text on Web pages viewed through IE--whether that page's owner liked the idea or not. The highlighted text could have then linked to Microsoft sites. Like every astute teenager, politician, and televangelist, Microsoft understands that it's far better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. The company ended up dropping plans to include Smart Tags in Internet Explorer, after a firestorm of protest. See "Microsoft Drops Smart Tags Under Criticism."

Tagadelic, Baby, Yeah!

The Smart Tags in Office don't have a lot to do with antitrust practices. For the most part, they just link you to Outlook 2002 features. For instance, Word 2002 recognizes proper names in your documents and displays a dotted purple underline beneath each proper name. Assuming you use Outlook 2002, with a couple of clicks you can initiate an e-mail message, schedule a meeting, open a contact, add to contacts, or insert addresses. To see the types of text Word can recognize, choose Tools, AutoCorrect Options, and click the Smart Tags tab.

As you'll see, Word can recognize proper names, dates, times, addresses, places, telephone numbers, recent Outlook e-mail recipients, and financial symbols. If you want to take Smart Tags for a test drive, go to the Smart Tags tab and make sure the options "Label text with smart tags" and "Show Smart Tag Actions buttons" are checked. If you want Word to cease and desist all the dotted underlining, just click to turn off any "recognizers" you wish. If you know you don't want any of them, just uncheck the option "Label text with smart tags."

For any Smart Tags you leave turned on, Word will mark the text with the dotted underline, which is quite faint. Unlike the spelling and grammar underlines, the Smart Tag underlines don't catch my eye when I'm writing, so I don't find them intrusive. To see what a Smart Tag has to offer, just hover your mouse pointer over the underlined text to display a small icon with a lower-case "i" inside a circle. Point at the "i" and an arrow appears; click on the arrow to display the pop-up menu, which is chock full of helpful commands specific to the type of "recognizer" you've chosen.

Smart Tags can cut down on typing and flipping between applications. For example, you can instantly create an Outlook contact for someone whose name appears in your Word document. Say you're working on a company directory that lists employees by name, address, and phone number. You spy the name of your coworker, Amanda Reckonwith, and you want to add her to your Outlook contacts. Simply hover above the underlined name, click the "i" that appears, and choose Add to Contacts from the pop-up menu. Word will open the Outlook contact, with the information already filled in, including the name, address and phone numbers in the appropriate fields. Pretty impressive.

Click 'n' Tag

Smart Tags work a little differently in Excel. Instead of a dotted underline, Excel displays a small purple triangle in the lower-right corner of a cell to designate a Smart Tag. Excel recognizes only two kinds of text: recent e-mail recipients (people you've recently sent e-mail to) and financial symbols. The pop-up menus work the same: Just hover over the word, click the "i," then click the arrow to display the pop-up menu. You can set your Smart Tag options by choosing Tools, AutoCorrect Options, and clicking the Smart Tags tab.

Excel's e-mail-recipient Smart Tag lets you initiate various Outlook actions, just as the proper-name Smart Tag does in Word. The Smart Tag presents a menu that lets you send an e-mail message, schedule a meeting, open an Outlook contact, add to contacts, or insert an address into your worksheet. If you enter a stock symbol in your worksheet, Smart Tags will recognize it and offer a menu of options. You can choose to insert a refreshable stock table into your Excel worksheet, or link to the latest price for that stock, news about that company, or get a report on that company from the Web. And where does this helpful information come from? Why, MSN MoneyCentral, of course.

This is the kind of manipulation that makes most people uneasy and makes Microsoft's competitors crazy, and it's easy to see why. The more Microsoft's Web sites become intertwined with our daily lives, the more tightly we feel the company's dominance on the Internet economy. However, I'm not convinced a link from my Office software is an egregious violation of fair market practices. I'm more comfortable with a link from Word to Outlook than I am with a link from Excel to MSN, but neither one strikes me as crossing the line.