3 Office 365 Hacks That'll Make You the Office Hero UK Edition

SOLUTION BRIEF

3 Office 365 Hacks That’ll Make You the Office Hero Revenues from Microsoft Office 365 use in commercial settings grew 7%¹ quarter over quarter in the second quarter of 2016, highlighting a blistering pace of growth for Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite.

Office 365 is rising at a meteoric pace, and organisations have an opportunity to leverage the emerging productivity solution to drive revenue creation and resolve many longstanding productivity gaps.

For example, organisations that have faced complicated file sharing due to the need to export Word documents into SharePoint and have users work separately on a common file can now enable individuals to work simultaneously on a single document residing in the cloud.

These types of gains come with the combination of new feature sets and cloud functionality within Office 365, and these three productivity hacks can help you take the solution’s core benefits to another level:

1. Pay Attention to The New Functions And Features List One of the best parts about a cloud-based productivity suite is developers can add new capabilities on an ongoing basis and update the solution accordingly. This flexibility stands in stark contrast to iterative systems that would go years with nothing more than security patches. However, these new additions to apps are beneficial only if your users actually know about them. This is where the new functions and features list comes into play.

Instead of hoping to stumble on new capabilities during everyday operations, Office 365 gives users a new functions and features list that lets them quickly identify changes to the software and learn what new features do. A Microsoft blog post pointed out this list can serve as a go-to guide² when it comes to staying ahead of ongoing updates to the app suite.

2. Let Office Do The Work For You Microsoft has built Office 365 with tools that will take some basic manual tasks out of your hands, saving time and energy. A Business Insider report highlighted two key features³ that can pay dividends by doing work for you: 1. PowerPoint Designer lets you upload a photo and shows you ways you could incorporate it into a slide, providing a quick perspective on how different options look so you don’t have to experiment on your own.

2. The Tell Me box in Word lets you use regular language to ask a digital assistant specific questions, saving you from having to look up tutorials online or dig through menus to find a specific function that you can’t seem to track down.

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SOLUTION BRIEF 3 Office 365 Hacks That’ll Make You the Office Hero (continued)

Simplifying some of the manual processes that go alongside creating robust documents and presentations can lead to huge productivity gains, and Office 365 has you covered.

directly from just about any app within the suite, do smart searches on Bing from Word documents and use Outlook add-ons to simplify their planning.

In some cases, organisations are even using Outlook as a hub to crowdsource problem-solving. Essentially, an outlook add-on can be used as a central location for communication between internal and external user groups to work together to resolve an issue, letting businesses tackle key challenges that have held them back in the past.

Making The Most of a New Productivity Opportunity 3. Use Outlook Add-Ons Creatively Outlook is often a central hub for scheduling, and add-ons make it easier to access external services as needed while planning events.

For example, Business Insider highlighted a Starbucks add-on that lets users schedule meetings at the cafe instead of conference rooms for more casual sessions and an Uber add-on that includes reminders to request a ride prior to planned travel.

These are just two key add-on opportunities, and Microsoft has integrated a variety of apps and APIs across the Office 365 ecosystem. Users can Skype

Office 365 fits a new mold when it comes to enterprise productivity suites. The rigid confines of disk- and license-based solutions are giving way to cloud subscriptions, providing a degree of flexibility that wasn’t possible in the past.

If you want to take full advantage of these new capabilities, reach out to us at Learning Tree, and we’ll help you find the right courses for your specific needs or even work with your business for corporate training events.

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Sources: 1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2016-Q3/press-release-webcast 2 https://blogs.partner.microsoft.com/mpn/three-office-365-productivity-hacks/ 3 http://www.businessinsider.com/useful-hidden-features-in-office-365-2016-6/#use-paypal-from-within-outlook-8

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