Add Wikipedia App to Microsoft Word 2013

Office 2013 and SharePoint apps are great, but I have to admit that I haven’t done much with them yet. Today, I found myself wondering what I’d have to do to get Wikipedia to open when I right-clicked on a word or phrase in Word 2013.

To add Wikipedia, all I had to do was choose Insert from the Ribbon menu at the top of the screen and then click the Wikipedia icon. If you click “My Apps,” you can navigate to the Office 2013 app store and check out what other interesting apps are available.

Once you click the icon, you’ll need to confirm that you trust this new app.

After you’ve trusted the app, you can now quickly look up words or phrases from your Word documents in Wikipedia. Very cool!

Switching the app that opens by default when you choose the “Define” option is not obvious. To choose a different app, you first need to hide the Wikipedia app my clicking “My Apps” in the Ribbon and then clicking “Manage My Apps.”

For example, let’s say you wanted to use the Bing dictionary for the Define option. You can add the Bing app, then choose Manage My Apps—which opens a web page—and hide Wikipedia from that page. Once you hide an app, you should be able to click the “Refresh” button in the My Apps view and see that the app is no longer there.

After you’re done, you can unhide Wikipedia. Note that some people have reported that they had to restart Word after hiding Wikipedia.

I should mention that it’s also possible to have multiple apps running. In the screenshot below, I have both the Bing dictionary and the Wikipedia app open.