A new program called KallOut works with all Microsoft Office products to let you search the web right from within Office. After installing KallOut, an icon will appear in your system tray to show that it’s running. To use the program, just double-click or select any word or phrase from within any Microsoft Office program (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Notepad, WordPad), Adobe PDFs, Facebook, even IE and Firefox. You’ll then see a small KallOut icon appear. From here, you can access a small pop-up menu that displays several different search options. You can choose from several different search providers including Google, Live Search, Yahoo Search, and Technorati. You can also search reference sites like Wikipedia and Dictionary.com. videos on YouTube, or photos on Flickr, and more.
What’s really interesting about KallOut is that it essentially brings the power of the web into traditional Microsoft Office software. One of the perks of using online office suites is that, by their very nature, they’re connected to the real-time information of the web. So for example, if you needed to pull up a stock quote in a spreadsheet, it was possible. However, for many people, especially those using Office software in a traditional business environment, the web office suites are just not robust enough, rich enough, or powerful enough for the tasks at hand. But with a simple add-in like KallOut, you no longer have to choose between easy access to the live web or feature-rich software – you can have both.
Here are some examples of Kallout in use:
