Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is growing in popularity; thanks to the diverse suite of products it offers to commercial users. According to the vendor, there are more than 155 million active users on a subscription plan, and even more customers who use at least one Office product. - Ethan Searle | LanDynamix Technology Advisor

Ready to get an Office 365 subscription? LanDynamix has you covered. If you’re just using email and Outlook to manage your communications, and you’re using core programs like Word and Excel only on a temporary basis, you might not be getting the most bang for your buck.

Here are 13 ways of getting more out of your Office 365 subscription

These are some of our favourite hacks, tricks and features that can help you improve your productivity and get more of your Office 365 subscription:

• Pay attention to Tell Me:

  Do you feel like a novice to your Office 365 subscription, with little knowledge of all the productivity tools and best features of the platform? Then you need to use Tell Me! At the top of most Office 365 apps, including Word and Excel, you’ll see a box that says “Tell me what you want to do..” Even if you know how to perform a task, consider putting it into “Tell Me” to see how Office recommends handling it and you’ll be amazed by the usefulness of this little feature.

• Make use of Clutter:

  Do you know how you always tell your kids that the room isn’t going to clean itself? You probably have it ingrained that your inbox isn’t going to clean itself either – ah, but it can! Once you turn on the Clutter feature in Outlook, Microsoft will start paying attention to which emails you read and which ones you leave unread. Once it understands your preferences, it will start sorting your frequently unread or low-priority message into the “clutter” folder automatically.

• Manage Conversations with Ignore:

  If you’ve used Gmail, you know there’s a useful “mute” button that allows you to stop receiving updates and notifications from a thread you don’t want to be part of. An Outlook 365 subscription gives you something similar – the Ignore Conversation feature, which deletes the conversation and stops you from getting new notifications about it.

• Keep all your notes in one place OneNote:

  Do you keep notes somewhere, on sticky notes, in a planner, in an open Word file, or on an online to-do list? These methods might seem convenient at times, but horribly ineffective – especially when you have a product like OneNote at your disposal. OneNote helps you take notes, build to-do lists and most importantly, access your content no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

• Take better notes with Office Lens:

  While we’re at it, your Office 365 subscription offers you a tool to take better notes (and take them faster) by using the Microsoft Office Lens app. With Office Lens, you can use your smartphone’s camera to take a snapshot of anything – i.e. sheet of paper or whiteboard – and turn it into a digital note. Your days of scrambling to jot down a whiteboard diagram are over.

• Research on the go with Smart Lookup:

  When typing something and you’re curious about a word or phrase you’ve used, consider highlighting it, then take advantage of Office 365’s Smart Lookup feature. In just one click, you can pull up a Bing search window and find out more about whatever you’re writing about.

• Collaborate with co-authoring in Microsoft Word:

  Co-authoring and document collaboration aren’t just relegated to Google Docs. With an Office 365 subscription, you can instantly share your documents with your co-workers and track their changes as you work toward a finished product, if you save them in OneDrive or SharePoint.

• Use SharePoint Views to organize documents:

  If you keep lots of documents in SharePoint, you can create custom SharePoint Views to organize them better. You can establish parameters like geographic regions, or other factors, and view only the documents that fit those parameters.

• Attach files conveniently:

  SharePoint is super convenient for attaching files, so start using it if you haven’t already. Use the Share+ function to add a shareable link to your emails, instead of going through the process of attaching (and taking up space in your inbox).

• Use Sway to beef up your slideshows:

  Are your slideshows feeling stale? Jazz them up with Sway. Sway offers a lot of templates, background photos and bonus features to make your content more visually appealing. You can save time by starting with an outline that you import from an existing document.

• Sign documents digitally with DocuSign:

  We’ve all gone through the hassle of trying to get a physical signature on a digital document in the modern world, and we know how much time it inordinately takes. That’s why DocuSign makes things easier. With DocuSign, you can get any document in Word or Outlook signed without bothering with a print-and-scan process.

• Use pins to make life easier:

  In the past, you might have used a shortcut to gain immediate access to a document you regularly work from. Now you can use a pin. Right-click any document and you can see a list of all your recent documents; from there, right-click your most important document and you’ll be able to pin it to your taskbar for ready access.

• Organize people with groups:

  Creating Office 365 groups allows you to maintain communications with specific members, both within and outside your organization, using parameters you set. After creating a group, you can share a calendar between the members, exchange files, and of course, conveniently chat.

These Office 365 hacks could change your life for the better

These hacks and tricks could save you hours of time every week, keep you more prepared, and ultimately, squeeze more value out of your Office 365 subscription. Put them to good use as you continue pursuing your professional goals.

Ready to set up Office 365 for your business and increase your productivity? Microsoft Office 365 from LanDynamix makes it simple and secure. Plus, it’s easy to get started even if you’re non-technical.