Having some useful reference information by hand when writing a post or doing research online is an awesome way to both get more productive and also to create a thorough, deeper-researched copies.
Therefore you may find the following two tips useful as well as easy to implement in your daily routine.
1. Access reference information while you write or read: take advantage of MS Word’s Lookup Feature
I am using Microsoft Word Lookup feature which I find very useful. Unfortunately, too many people are absolutely unaware of it.
So, when writing or reading the post in Word, just highlight any word, then right click and select “Look up”:
A sidebar panel will open with the reference information for the selected word:
You can configure the reference info sources by “Research options” right in the sidebar panel. In the dialog, you can select more sources, add your own or exclude those you don’t need:
2. Access reference information while you browse the web: take advantage of Lookitup Greasemonkey script
There’s one handy Greasemonkey script that allows to quickly look up any word in a number of configured online reference sources.
The script is LookItUp and it works as follows:
- Install the script (get the Greasemonkey for that);
- While reading online, select any word and click the reference source short key.
Some of the default short keys include:
- w – look it up in Wikipedia
- d – look it up in Google definitions
- u – urban dictionary
The sources and the short keys can all be configured (deleted, moved, added, etc) via the tool Options (accessed via FireFox Tools -> Greasemonkey -> User Script Commands -> LookItUp settings).
