The search feature is a good improvement. You see it used to various degrees in other complicated programs with lots of features (eg emacs, blender, even jira).

The search feature is a good improvement. You see it used to various degrees in other complicated programs with lots of features (eg emacs, blender, even jira). It’s good because it can make things better for people looking for a function they don’t know and for advanced users looking for something they do know. And it provides a good intermediate level of speed between digging through menus and knowing the keyboard shortcut. On the other hand, the built in help system before 2007 or so worked out pretty well (maybe it was slightly dying by 2003. I remember the vba help worked well and maybe the rest didn’t work so well), whereas the help system in 2007 was completely awful and I think it was getting worse. I haven’t used office recently enough to know if they ever fixed it or if it was just replaced by incomplete documentation, google searches, and obscure forums.