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How-To Geek

How to use researcher in microsoft word for essays and papers.

With Researcher in Microsoft Word, you can reduce the time you spend researching your school essay or research paper. Close your web browser and use Word’s built-in tool.

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What can you do with researcher, open researcher in microsoft word, review relevant topics and top sources, add topic items to your document.

Microsoft wants to make your research easier. With the Word Researcher tool, you can close your web browser and get sources for school essays, research papers, and similar documents in a few clicks.

The Researcher feature, powered by Bing, gives you a handy search box to find people, events, places, and concepts. The results of your search provide you with relevant topics and top sources including books, journals, websites, and images.

When you select the source you want, you can see an overview, history, location, images, and other important details. And the best part is, you never leave your Microsoft Word document.

In addition to viewing the details for your topic, you can start an outline for your paper as well as adding and citing text. Click the main subject or one of the information sections and add it directly to your document.

Here, we'll show you how to reduce the time you spend researching and speed up the creation of your paper with the Researcher tool in Microsoft Word.

At the time of writing,  Researcher is available with Word for Microsoft 365, Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac, and Word 2016. It is available to Microsoft 365 subscribers for Windows desktop clients.

To use the Researcher tool, open the "References" tab of your Word document. Click "Researcher" from the "Research" section of the ribbon.

When the pane opens on the right, type a term into the Search box and you're on your way!

You'll receive results for your search with Relevant Topics at the top and Top Sources beneath.

Relevant Topics

Some topics may only give you a couple of Relevant Topics. Click "More Topics" below that section to see additional sources.

If you click one of the Relevant Topics, you'll see a nice overview of the subject. At the end of the "Overview" section, click "Read More" for full details.

Depending on your topic, you'll then see several block sections packed with details. This structure comes in handy for starting your outline with them, which we'll describe below.

If the subject and Relevant Topic have images, you can click "See All Images" for a neat grid of photos and illustrations. Click one to open your browser and view the image online. Plus, you can add these to your document, which we'll also show you below.

Top Sources

For even more options, the "Top Sources" area offers books, journals, and websites. Select any one of those for its details.

If you choose a Relevant Topic at the top first, you can then filter your Top Sources by subtopic. Click the drop-down box for "All Topics" and pick one.

While most of the material is contained within Word, you may come across a source here and there that you must open in your browser. Click the link to open the source site in your default web browser.

Along with viewing information on your topic, you can add headings, text, and images directly to your document using Researcher.

Add Headings

On the top right of each source's section, you'll see a plus sign. Click the "+" icon to add that section as a collapsible heading for your document outline. Remember, this only adds the heading, not the text, within the section.

If you want to add a snippet of text to your document, you can do this as well. Select the text from the source by dragging your cursor through it. When you release, you'll see a small box appear with options for "Add and Cite" and "Add."

When you choose "Add and Cite," the text will pop into your document with the source cited at the end of the snippet. The citation is formatted automatically, so you can add it to a bibliography easily.

When you choose "Add," the text will still appear in your document, but without the citation.

If your topic offers images, and you click "See All Images," you have the option to add one or more of those, too. This is super convenient because you don't have to hunt them down yourself.

Click the "+" icon in the corner of the image to add it to your paper.

It will appear in your document with the source cited beneath it.

Be sure to respect copyrights when using the available images for your purpose. If you're unsure whether you can use an image, click "Learn More" above the image grid. This takes you to the Microsoft legal webpage explaining copyright and offering FAQs. You can also check our article on images with a Creative Commons License for those sources from Creative Commons.

College essays and research papers are enough work in themselves. By using Researcher in Microsoft Word, you can ease the burden of the research for your document and get a jumpstart on its contents.

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: phi-3 technical report: a highly capable language model locally on your phone.

Abstract: We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone. The innovation lies entirely in our dataset for training, a scaled-up version of the one used for phi-2, composed of heavily filtered web data and synthetic data. The model is also further aligned for robustness, safety, and chat format. We also provide some initial parameter-scaling results with a 7B and 14B models trained for 4.8T tokens, called phi-3-small and phi-3-medium, both significantly more capable than phi-3-mini (e.g., respectively 75% and 78% on MMLU, and 8.7 and 8.9 on MT-bench).

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Research your paper easily within OneNote for Windows 10

Important:  The Research feature in OneNote for Windows 10 is being replaced by Smart Lookup in OneNote on Windows. If you don't already have it, we encourage you to download the latest version of OneNote on Windows .

Researcher in OneNote helps you find topics and incorporate reliable sources and content for your research paper in just a few steps. Explore and research the material related to your content and add it to your notes without leaving OneNote.

Note:  Researcher is only available if you have a  Microsoft 365 subscription and is only available in the following languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese.

Research and add content to your page

Note:  Researcher uses Bing to pull in the appropriate content from the web and provide structured, safe and credible information.

On the Insert tab, choose Researcher .

In the search box, type a keyword for the topic you are researching and press Enter.

The Results pane shows a list of sources you can use in your notes.

Choose a topic in the Results pane to explore in detail.

Select the text in the source and choose Add to add only text to your document.

Tap the plus sign in the upper-right corner to add an image and the text to your notes.

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Our 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report

May 15, 2024 | Brad Smith – Vice Chair and President; Melanie Nakagawa – Chief Sustainability Officer

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Today, Microsoft published the 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report. This report covers fiscal year 2023, and measures progress against our 2020 baseline. You can read the foreword below and explore the report in its entirety  here.

Accelerating innovation and partnership for people and the planet

Four years ago, Microsoft committed that, by 2030, we would become carbon negative, water positive, zero waste, and protect more land than we use. Since that announcement, we have seen major changes both in the technology sector and in our understanding of what it will take to meet our climate goals. New technologies, including generative AI, hold promise for new innovations that can help address the climate crisis. At the same time, the infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector. As we take stock as a company in 2024, we remain resolute in our commitment to meet our climate goals and to empower others with the technology needed to build a more sustainable future.

At the end of last year, the world met in Dubai at COP28 to assess global sustainability progress. The results were sobering. The world is not on track to meet critical climate goals, and we see many of the world’s challenges reflected in our own situation. During the past four years, we have overcome multiple bottlenecks and have accelerated progress in meaningful ways. As we report here, we are on track in several areas. But not in every area. We therefore are mobilizing to accelerate progress in areas where we’re not yet on track.

In four areas we are on track, and in each of these we see progress that has the potential to have global impact beyond our own sustainability work. These are:

• Reducing our direct operational emissions (Scope 1 and 2)
• Accelerating carbon removal
• Designing for circularity to minimize waste and reusing cloud hardware
• Improving biodiversity and protecting more land than we use

At the same time, there are two areas where we’re not yet on track, and in each of these we are intensively engaged in work to identify and pursue additional breakthroughs. These are:

• Reducing our Scope 3, or indirect, emissions
• Reducing water use and replenishing more water than we consume in our datacenter operations

Even amid the challenges, we remain optimistic. We’re encouraged by ongoing progress across our campuses and datacenters, and throughout our value chain. Even more, we’re inspired by the scores of executives and employees across Microsoft who are rolling up their sleeves and identifying new and innovative steps that are helping us to close critical gaps. We all recognize the same thing: There is no issue today that connects everyone on the planet more than the issues around climate change. We all need to succeed together.

Carbon negative

Our carbon negative commitment includes three primary areas: reducing carbon emissions; increasing use of carbon-free electricity; and carbon removal. We made meaningful progress on carbon-free electricity and carbon removal in FY23. Microsoft has taken a first-mover approach to supporting carbon-free electricity infrastructure, making long-term investments to bring more carbon-free electricity onto the grids where we operate.

In 2023, we increased our contracted portfolio of renewable energy assets to more than 19.8 gigawatts (GW), including projects in 21 countries. In FY23, we also contracted 5,015,019 metric tons of carbon removal to be retired over the next 15 years. We are continuing to build a portfolio of projects, balanced across low, medium, and high durability solutions.

Carbon reduction continues to be an area of focus, especially as we work to address Scope 3 emissions. In 2023, we saw our Scope 1 and 2 emissions decrease by 6.3% from our 2020 baseline. This area remains on track to meet our goals. But our indirect emissions (Scope 3) increased by 30.9%. In aggregate, across all Scopes 1–3, Microsoft’s emissions are up 29.1% from the 2020 baseline.

The rise in our Scope 3 emissions primarily comes from the construction of more datacenters and the associated embodied carbon in building materials, as well as hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. Our challenges are in part unique to our position as a leading cloud supplier that is expanding its datacenters. But, even more, we reflect the challenges the world must overcome to develop and use greener concrete, steel, fuels, and chips. These are the biggest drivers of our Scope 3 challenges.

We have launched a company-wide initiative to identify and develop the added measures we’ll need to reduce our Scope 3 emissions.

Leaders in every area of the company have stepped up to sponsor and drive this work. This led to the development of more than 80 discrete and significant measures that will help us reduce these emissions – including a new requirement for select scale, high-volume suppliers to use 100% carbon-free electricity for Microsoft delivered goods and services by 2030. As a whole, this work builds on our multi-prong strategy, this year focusing on the following:

• Improving measurement by harnessing the power of digital technology to garner better insight and action
• Increasing efficiency by applying datacenter innovations that improve efficiency as quickly as possible
• Forging partnerships to accelerate technology breakthroughs through our investments and AI capabilities, including for greener steel, concrete, and fuels
• Building markets by using our purchasing power to accelerate market demand for these types of breakthroughs
• Advocating for public policy changes that will accelerate climate advances

Water positive

We take a holistic approach to becoming water positive, which includes water access, replenishment, innovation, reduction, and policy. In 2023, we achieved our water access target by providing more than 1.5 million people with access to clean water and sanitation solutions. We contracted water replenishment projects estimated to provide more than 25 million m 3 in volumetric water benefit over the lifetime of these projects – enough water to fill about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Finally, we continue to drive innovation in water , through first-of-their kind replenishment projects like FIDO, which leverages AI-enabled acoustic analysis to reduce water loss from leakage.

Looking ahead, as our datacenter business continues to grow, so does the need to minimize our water consumption and replenish more than we consume in these operations. In FY23, our progress on water accelerated, and we know we need to implement an even stronger plan to accelerate it further. We therefore are investing in our water positive commitment in four ways:

• We are taking action to reduce the intensity with which we withdraw resources by continuing to design and innovate in order to minimize water use and achieve our intensity target
• Our new datacenters are designed and optimized to support AI workloads and will consume zero water for cooling. This initiative aims to further reduce our global reliance on freshwater resources as AI compute demands increase
• We are partnering to advance water policy . In 2023, we joined the Coalition for Water Recycling. Over the coming year we will finalize a position and strategy for water policy
• We are developing innovative scalable replenishment projects in high water stress locations where we operate datacenters. We recently announced Water United, a new initiative to unite public and private sectors in reducing water loss from leakage across the Colorado River Basin

Our journey to zero waste includes reducing waste at our campuses and datacenters, advancing circular cloud hardware and packaging, and improving device and packaging circularity. In FY23, we achieved a reuse and recycle rate of 89.4% for servers and components across all cloud hardware, a target that is increasingly important as needs for cloud services continue to grow. In 2023, we also diverted more than 18,537 metric tons of waste from landfills or incinerators across our owned datacenters and campuses, and we reduced single-use plastics in our Microsoft product packaging to 2.7%.

From expanding our Circular Centers to piloting programs that give a second life to used fiber optic cables through partnerships with local technical schools, we are working to keep materials in use longer and approach our work at every stage with circularity in mind. We are accelerating our work to reuse and recycle cloud hardware wherever possible, and launched two new Circular Centers in Quincy, Washington, and Chicago, Illinois in 2023.

Protecting ecosystems

We have committed to protecting more land than we use by 2025, while preserving and restoring ecosystems in the areas where we live and work. As of FY23, we exceeded our land protection target by more than 40%. At this point, 15,849 acres of land have been legally designated as permanently protected compared to our goal of 11,000 acres.

We are incorporating green business practices that support the surrounding ecosystems near our campuses and datacenters. This includes regenerative design solutions around our datacenters that enhance local biodiversity, improved stormwater management, and contributing to climate resilience. We are also piloting AI-driven Microsoft technology to provide insights into the overall health of the ecosystem and inform future actions.

Customer and global sustainability

In last year’s Environmental Sustainability Report, we announced that we were expanding our ambition to help advance sustainability for our customers and the world. In 2023, we continued this work to empower our customers and partners on their own sustainability journey by creating the technology needed to better manage resources and optimize systems. On a global scale, we focused on accelerating innovation, research, and policy, not only for ourselves but also to support a more sustainable world for all.

The shift from pledges to progress requires action, transparency, and accountability. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is helping customers unify data and garner richer insights into the sustainability of their business. In 2023, we expanded Microsoft Sustainability Manager to include Scopes 1, 2, and all 15 categories of Scope 3 carbon emissions to help track progress and inform action across an organization’s operations and value chains.

As the world experiences worsening impacts of climate change, we are also helping to put planetary data into the hands of researchers, governments, companies, and individuals through the Planetary Computer. We are providing open access to petabytes of environmental monitoring data to help empower people with actionable information to protect their communities.

Microsoft’s sustainability progress requires global engagement. We are investing in innovative solutions, advancing research, and advocating for policies that we believe can drive progress at scale. A hallmark of this effort has been our Climate Innovation Fund (CIF) – our $1 billion commitment set in 2020 to advance innovation beyond Microsoft’s four walls. To date, the CIF has allocated $761 million toward innovative climate technologies including commercial direct air-capture technologies, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), industrial decarbonization, and more.

Our science, research, and AI for Good teams are also working to accelerate solutions and develop climate resilience with AI. In November 2023, we published a whitepaper and playbook that expands on the incredible potential of AI for sustainability. Through our AI for Good team, we are collaborating with the United Nations to research the use of AI to advance the Early Warning for All Initiative, with a goal of better understanding the populations that may be at risk of extreme weather events and other threats.

Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” To meet this generational challenge, we are putting sustainability at the center of our work. With each emerging technology, with each new opportunity, we ask ourselves an important question: How can we advance sustainability?

As we strive to answer that question, we are developing new approaches, experimenting with new partnerships, and learning as we go. We are optimistic about the role technology can continue to play in accelerating climate progress, and we look forward to working with others on this critical journey for all of us.

Tags: carbon emissions , carbon neutral , climate change , Climate Innovation Fund , COP28 , Environmental Sustainability , Environmental Sustainability Report , net zero , water positive

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Sainsbury’s and Microsoft collaborate to power up customer and colleague experience with AI

May 17, 2024 | Microsoft Reporter, News Centre UK

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• Sainsbury’s and Microsoft have signed a five-year strategic partnership, designed to help deliver the retailer’s Next Level Sainsbury’s strategy
• It will put the power of AI in the hands of store colleagues, create more efficient and more engaging stores and online shopping experiences, and help deliver leading customer satisfaction and returns for shareholders

Sainsbury plc and Microsoft Corp. today announced a new five-year strategic partnership, using Microsoft’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and Sainsbury’s rich datasets to help accelerate the retailer’s recently announced Next Level Sainsbury’s strategy.

The partnership will improve store operations, drive greater efficiency for colleagues, and provide customers with more efficient and effective service, delivering stronger returns for shareholders under Sainsbury’s ‘Save and invest to win’ programme.

By harnessing Microsoft’s products and expert engineering capabilities, Sainsbury’s will put the power of AI in the hands of store colleagues and make shopping more engaging and more convenient for millions of customers across the UK – both online and in store.

This will be supported by upskilling programmes for Sainsbury’s colleagues, helping them learn and grow in the new AI-driven economy.

Sainsbury’s will use Microsoft’s services to transform across three core areas:

• Enhanced customer experiences : Sainsbury’s will use generative AI to create a more interactive online shopping experience and improve customers’ search experience, making shopping more efficient and engaging.
• Empowered store colleagues : Store colleagues will have real-time data and insights for key processes, like smarter shelf replenishment processes. Using AI to pull together multiple data inputs, such as shelf edge cameras, colleagues will be guided to the shelves that need replenishing; saving valuable time as well as ensuring sales opportunities aren’t missed. Sainsbury’s store colleagues will have more time to focus on the things that matter to customers, with access to AI-guided support to address customer and colleague queries effectively in the moment, improving efficiency and enabling the delivery of leading service for Sainsbury’s customers.
• Data powering the Sainsbury’s business, built on smart cloud foundations : Sainsbury’s data assets combined with Microsoft 365 collaboration tools, generative AI and machine learning capabilities will enable Sainsbury’s to continue driving returns through its ‘Save and invest to win’ programme: transforming operations, driving better decision making, and running a more efficient business. This will be delivered through Microsoft Azure as part of Sainsbury’s cloud ecosystem, reducing time to market for new services and innovations.

Clodagh Moriarty, Sainsbury’s Chief Retail and Technology Officer, said: “Our collaboration with Microsoft will accelerate our ambition to become the UK’s leading AI-enabled grocer.

“It’s one of the key ways we’re investing in transforming our capabilities over the next three years, enabling us to take another big leap forward in efficiency and productivity, continue to provide leading customer service and deliver returns for our shareholders.”

Clare Barclay, CEO, Microsoft UK, said: “Today, Sainsbury’s has laid out a bold vision that puts AI at the heart of its business, accelerating the development of new services, which will enhance and transform the customer and colleague experience.

“We are delighted to be working with Sainsbury’s to power the next generation of retail.”

Tags: AI , Azure , cloud , machine learning , Retail , Sainsbury's

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