Office 365 is packed with features and tools that are designed to make working for yourself and your colleagues as simple and as intuitive as possible. It’ll help you be more productive, work more efficiently and help you share all of your work and ideas in a flash!
How does it do this, you ask? By leveraging cloud technology. (Which you can read all about here!) You like the way that Office works, right? And you’ve been using Excel and Word for years? Well, they aren’t that different in Office 365! You just need to spend a little bit of time getting used to the way they work.
We did a bit of homework, spoke to a couple of our clients and put together this list of some of our favourite bits:
Realtime Co-authoring (Word, Excel etc)
This is really cool. Basically you start writing a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. And as you’re doing it, colleagues can join in and make changes to the document with you – all at the same time! It’ll clearly identify who’s making changes on the exact location of the document in question. It takes your collaboration and creativity to the next level!
Stop sending attachments – they clutter mailboxes!
We’ve all hit the capacity of our mailbox at some point. And usually it’s the fault of attachments piling up over the course of time. So stop using attachments! Office 365 uses SharePoint and OneDrive to solve this issue. Simply upload a file to your O365 cloud storage and click “share” – And presto! You’ll be able to email them a link to your file, without actually attaching the file.
You can even grab the link of the files location on your OneDrive and paste it into an email. Even better, you’ll be able to define whether this person has the right to edit the document you sent to them or not.
Work offline and sync everything up later
OneDrive storage is synced up to whatever device you’re using. So you can use this to work offline on that excel spreadsheet, or report that needs to be done. When you manage to find Internet again, Office 365 will automatically upload and sync any changes you’ve made to your documents. All new versions of the document you’re working on, will be automatically pushed to other devices. It’s great for people getting a train to work, or to a meeting. All very clever!
Chat to your colleagues with Skype, in any office app!
Skype for Business is one of favourite Office 365 apps. We’re always using it here at ABS towers. It’s especially great if you have a workforce that operates in more than one location. (I mean what business doesn’t have employees working remotely these days?)
Skype is deeply integrated into Office 365, you can use it to chat with colleagues, share screens and even have audio or video conversations with people. And you don’t even have to switch screens, open a new app or anything like that. Combine this with real-time co-authoring and you’ll be one step close to productivity nirvana.
Visualise your data
Microsoft have spent a lot of time integrating PowerBI and Excel. One of the most interesting features of Excel is the interactive data visualisation features. They’re fantastic because they bring all of your data to life. For instance, say you’re working with some Geographical data and want to visualise that on a map – you can quite easily do that with Excel.
Simply import the data using a wizard and it’ll automatically populate a pre-rendered map with all of this information! And it isn’t just limited to maps. Data visualisation has a range of templates you can use to glean insight from your data.
Super smart emails
Seen the new clutter folder pop up in your Outlook? Don’t worry if you haven’t. It’s part of a very clever email organising system. It intelligently identify your most important emails and puts them into a folder called “focused”. It automatically moves less important emails to a folder called “clutter”. Don’t worry, though nothing important will be deleted or relegated to spam – it’s merely designed to help you prioiritise and focus.
In 2017, replying to emails has become stressful and time consuming. So we welcome anything that’ll help alleviate this burden!
Enjoyed this content? Why don’t you tell us what your favourite part of Office 365 is in our comments section below? Do you struggle with Office 365? Tell us! Our consultants might just be able to help you.
