A friend of mine selected a question on a Web page and with just a click or two had Microsoft Copilot answering the question. I noticed a tiny menu appeared when she selected the text; what utility was she using and how can I get it working on my PC?
I’m curious why you didn’t just ask her about what she did as I would imagine she’d be happy to explain what transpired. But… what it sounds like she was utilizing is a terrific feature built into Microsoft Edge called the text selection mini menu. That’s its real name, too, not just one I’m making up for this article! 🤓
Shortcuts: Enable Mini Menu | The Basics | Ask Copilot | More Actions | Translation
Interestingly, this option also shows up in the Mac version of Microsoft Edge (yes, Edge works very well in MacOS) but the mini menu doesn’t actually work, so it seems to be a Windows-only feature for now. Once you’ve enabled it in the Edge settings (I’ll show how in a moment) it’ll just pop up every time you select any text, offering you lots of helpful options.
ENABLE TEXT SELECTION MINI MENU
To enable the feature, go to Settings > Accessibility or use this simple shortcut: edge://settings/accessibility [it only works in Edge]. You might need to scroll down a bit but you’ll find these options on that page:
Enable the one labeled “Show mini menu when selecting text” and you can close the Settings tab.
EDGE TEXT SELECTION MENU: THE BASICS
With that enabled, select a word, a phrase, or even a full question or sentence and a tiny vertical icon menu will appear:
You can’t orient the menu horizontally because once you move the cursor over any of the icons, descriptive labels appear adjacent:
Now those icons make more sense! Want to disable it for a single Website? You can do that too. Choose “Hide menu” and you’ll see three options:
It’s definitely easy to disable if that’s what you’d like. But we have that question selected, so what else can we do?
ASK COPILOT ABOUT SELECTED TEXT
Choose “Ask Copilot” instead of “Hide menu” and the entire selected text will be fed to the Microsoft Copilot AI tool. It will then immediately analyze the text and respond as best makes sense. In this case, it’s a question, so it simply begins to answer the question:
Notice it doesn’t even really need to make sense as a question or be properly capitalized for Copilot to understand. It just starts chugging away on an answer to the question “has generative AI impacted or changed a project you are working on”, though obviously, it’s answering the more general query. Super convenient and quite likely what you saw your friend do on her computer.
EDGE MINI MENU: MORE ACTIONS
If you choose “••• More actions” from the mini menu, a considerably larger menu appears:
If I click on the selection highlighted, Edge will simply hand off the selected text to Bing or Google [depending on which I’ve selected as my default search engine]. Very slick!
DON’T MISS THE GREAT TRANSLATION FEATURE
My favorite feature with the text selection mini menu, however, is translation. Let’s jump to a page on the Japan Times Web site that’s mostly in Japanese:
I cannot read Japanese so I have no idea what the central portion actually says. But Edge can translate it! To do that, I’ll simply select those three lines of text then choose More actions and “Translate selection to English“:
What’s cool is that it replaces the Japanese with its English equivalent right on the page, producing this:
Now that’s a very useful feature, particularly if you frequently find yourself puzzling over content in other languages on web pages or in email messages. Remember too that if you get tired of the mini menu, you can choose “Hide menu” to disable it.
Pro tip: I’ve been writing about Microsoft Windows for many years and Microsoft Edge since it replaced Internet Explorer (and thank goodness for that). Please check out my extensive Windows help area for lots more useful tutorials while you’re visiting the site!