Page 34 - Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Part 1: Preliminaries
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Programming Inside Out

Getting Information with the Research Task Pane

Chapter 1

Figure 1-1. You can find synonyms, look up words in encyclopedias, and translate words
into foreign languages using the tools on the Research task pane.

Tip Research the contents of a cell
You can research the contents of a cell using the reference books in the Research task pane
by holding down the Alt key and clicking the cell containing the text you want to research.

At the bottom of the Research task pane are links you can click to update the research tools
installed on your computer, such as the thesauruses and dictionaries, and a link to the Office
Marketplace. The Office Marketplace is a resource on the Microsoft Web site that lists sub­
scription services you can use when the basic tools at your disposal in the Research task pane
don’t give you all of the information you need. Two such resources are the eLibrary, which
provides access to 13 million multimedia documents, including photographs and maps, that
are collected from periodicals published around the world, and more than 450,000 corporate
profiles from the Thomson Profiles collection. The collection includes information on
300,000 U.S. companies and includes industry comparisons, market share information,
rankings, and news stories from a collection of 2,500 journals.

Using Extended XML Capabilities

Probably the most dramatic change in Excel 2003 is the enhanced support for documents
using Extensible Markup Language (XML). Unlike Hypertext Markup Language (HTML),
which is used to describe the appearance of data on the Web, XML is used to describe the
structure of data. For example, an HTML table containing a company’s sales data would be
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