Using the Tell Me Feature in Microsoft Excel 2016

During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, we will discuss one of the new features in this version of Excel – Tell Me. We will demonstrate how you can utilize Tell Me and where to find additional help regarding this particular feature.

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Video Transcript:

In this section we’re going to take a look at the new Tell me feature. I think it’s important to cover this early in the course because you should find it quite helpful, particularly if you’re new to Excel. And even people with quite a bit of experience might well find useful things in this new feature.

Now before we look at Tell Me in detail I’d like to talk about Help a little bit more. I mentioned it before. I showed you how to bring up Help. I’m going to press the F1 key now to bring up Help. One of the things that’s going to become more and more of a feature of Office, I think, is that one day you will look at Help and it will say one thing and the next day you look at it and you have a completely different list of topics. It does tend to be much more dynamic than it used to be. And particularly if you’re using Excel via Office 365 you may get a few surprises. Now Help, today, on Excel 2016 Help contains very different things to what it contained yesterday. And amongst the things that are in there there is a Get Started category and within the Get Started category there’s a What’s New in Excel 2016 for Windows and within that, that’s a page or similar to a page that we looked at earlier. If you go down there you will find a description of the Tell Me feature.

Now generally speaking it’s always worth having a look at Help for any new feature that I introduce to get, if you like, Microsoft’s official view of that feature. Having said that, the level at which topics are covered in the Microsoft Excel 2016 Help is a much less detailed level than the coverage that I give you.

Let’s just go back Home again within the Help and again going back to Get Started there is actually Excel 2016 training and there are, for example, a couple of courses there. One of them is a Create your first workbook. Click on Go to course and it actually takes you through a relatively short course on Excel 2016. Again that’s well worth a try.

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Now if I do a Search on Help now for Tell Me, first of all I do things quickly with Tell Me and as you can see there’s a link there with a frame from a Microsoft video about Tell Me and a very small amount of printed information below it. So again, make sure you take a look at the Help on these topics although quite often it is very limited.

So let’s now try the Tell Me feature.

The first thing I’m going to do is to click in that Tell Me box. I’m going to type the word Bold. Now when I’ve typed Bold it basically gives me three options. Now it won’t always be exactly three but in this case three is good because it really gives me three types of options generally.

Now the first option is that it will actually give me access to the Bold command. Of course we’ve used the Bold button already. It’s in the Font Group on the Home Tab. We used it to make the word Hello bold much earlier on. And if there is a command that either matches what I’ve typed or seems to closely match what I’ve typed or involved in some way one or more of the words that I’ve typed then it will offer me that command. So in this case it offers me access to the Bold command.

It also offers me access to Help on that subject. So let’s have a look at the Help on Bold.

Now as with much of the online Help in Excel 2016 I don’t find it particularly impressive because I’ve sort of like the first item there to basically something like how to make something bold. Now there is help buried away in this long list of links that would help me to do that but I would have to dig around a bit to find it. But how successful, how good the links are in Help is very variable and sometimes you get some very good help and some very good links. So in this case the help on Bold would perhaps be a little bit awkward.

The third option was Smart Lookup on Bold. And what this does is to basically lookup the term for me and get me some help. Let’s look at a better example of something where I might want to do a Smart Lookup.

Let’s suppose that I’m doing some statistical work in Excel and I want to find out what Standard Deviation means. So what I’m going to do is type in the term Standard Deviation. Now you notice it offers me a couple of links related to commands which are available. It says Get Help and the third option is Smart Lookup. So let’s click on Smart Lookup. It opens a panel on the right called the Insights panel and then it gives me a number of links to helpful information about Standard Deviation such as, for example, a Wikipedia link and some Bing image search results. So I’ve got useful information on the right there where I can find out more about what Standard Deviation means.

Now in terms of actually executing a command let me try something different there. Let’s not have Bold. Let’s try Insert Table. Now with Insert Table selected you can see a whole list of potential commands that involve something like inserting a table. Now that one you see that has the word Table in one of the commands, Data Table. Format as Table has got Table in it. Insert has got the word Insert. But right at the top is the actual command with literally the name Insert Table. So it gives me the one that’s closest to the term I’ve entered first. That’s Insert Table. And if I click that now it will do exactly the same thing that would have happened if I had pressed Insert Table from the Ribbon in Excel 2016. So that gives me direct access to whatever Insert Table does and it does exactly the same thing as Insert Table.

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So there we are. That’s a bit of a whistle stop tour of the options in Tell Me. Be using it from time to time in the course. I suggest you give it a try. I think particularly in the early days you’ll find it a very useful feature.

That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!