A brand-new productivity feature in Office 2016 is the Tell Me search box. Tell Me is designed from the ground up to be efficient by allowing you to use intuitive language to find the commands you need fast. Tell Me uses a technique called word-wheeling, which enables it to start showing results as soon as you start typing. With every keystroke, the results are modified and refined.
Novice users and people upgrading from older Office versions love the Tell Me search box, even though in a some monitors and in Excel Online it takes almost as much space as all ribbon tabs combined!
Some expert users have voiced frustration by saying it is a pesky, annoying feature, since it cannot be turned off from Excel Options. Although, Tell Me behaves like a ribbon tab, it is not listed inside the Customize Ribbon panes. I find 'Tell Me' quite intruding, while trying to capture screenshots for my website tutorials. Tell Me brings memories from the infamous 'Clippy the Office Assistant', a help concept, which was perhaps ahead of its time.
Novice users and people upgrading from older Office versions love the Tell Me search box, even though in a some monitors and in Excel Online it takes almost as much space as all ribbon tabs combined!
Some expert users have voiced frustration by saying it is a pesky, annoying feature, since it cannot be turned off from Excel Options. Although, Tell Me behaves like a ribbon tab, it is not listed inside the Customize Ribbon panes. I find 'Tell Me' quite intruding, while trying to capture screenshots for my website tutorials. Tell Me brings memories from the infamous 'Clippy the Office Assistant', a help concept, which was perhaps ahead of its time.
How To Remove 'Tell Me What You Want To Do' Box in Excel 2016
Tell Me can be removed by customizing the ribbon 'from scratch', but your QAT settings will be removed as well. Another workaround is to add a new custom ribbon tab and rename its label with a long string of spaces. The new blank tab moves the pesky search box to the far right of the Excel window, where it blends nicely with the window sizing buttons.
The number of spaces needed to shift Tell Me to the far right depends on the number of visible built-in ribbon tabs (the Developer tab is optional by default), the number of VBA or COM addins loaded and your monitor's selected resolution.
Our Hide Tell Me VBA Add-in simplifies the task of shifting the search box by offering 4 predefined labels with increasing widths and a reset button (0%).
The number of spaces needed to shift Tell Me to the far right depends on the number of visible built-in ribbon tabs (the Developer tab is optional by default), the number of VBA or COM addins loaded and your monitor's selected resolution.
Our Hide Tell Me VBA Add-in simplifies the task of shifting the search box by offering 4 predefined labels with increasing widths and a reset button (0%).
Download
VBA Add-in (xlam) for Excel 2016
