Use These Office 365 Features to Ensure Your Work Is Efficient in the Office and on the Go

Make sure your team is leveraging all the latest Office 365 features to boost collaboration and improve productivity.

If your organization is currently using Office 365, you’re likely using the major Office applications such as Word, Outlook, Excel, and maybe a few others. What you may not realize is that Office 365 is constantly improving as Microsoft invests significant resources into their cloud-first approach to meeting the needs of their customers.

At MessageOps, we’ve been helping companies migrate to Office 365 for several years, and during this time we’ve picked up quite a few tips that many of our customers knew nothing about. Read on to learn some of the underutilized features that are included with Office 365.

Key features of Office 365 that you’ve properly never noticed

Chat functionality built into Office apps

Office 2016 apps now offer in-app integration with Skype allowing users to share screens, chat and have audio or video conversations with colleagues all from within your favorite Office applications.

Real-time co-authoring with Office applications

Eliminate confusion thanks to real-time co-authoring in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. By saving your data to OneDrive or SharePoint, everyone can work from the same document to ensure changes are always saved and tracked. Also, a newly integrated sidebar allows you to see who is currently working on the document as well as have the ability to share a document with any of your colleagues from within the Office app.

Save documents as PDF for easy sharing

When you’ve completed a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, you can now use the Save as PDF feature to instantly convert any document to a PDF. This can allow you easily to share documents without running into any formatting issues.

A large amount of cloud-based email storage

With Office 365, each user will have up to 50 GB of storage for email, tasks, calendar, notes, attachments, and contacts. In addition, you’ll have access to 1 GB of additional space in OneDrive.

Ability to work offline and upload changes later

With OneDrive your files are always synced with the device you’re currently using. This allows you to make changes to documents, even when you’re offline and have the new versions automatically uploaded to OneDrive when you reconnect to the Internet.

Access to Office Web & Mobile Apps

With Office 365, you’ll have access to Office 365 Web Apps which allow you to work on any cloud files from any web browser. You won’t even need to have Office installed on the computer you’re using. You’ll also have access to mobile apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and Outlook on both Android and iOS devices. This way you can access any of your documents from any tablet or mobile phone while you’re on the move.

Improved version control for Office apps

Read this blog to learn about improvements to version control and co-authoring, that help you to never run into an issue where changes to a document were lost. You’ll be able to see when changes were made, who made them and when they were made, all from within your favorite Office apps. In addition, you’ll be able to revert to a previous version of a document if necessary.

Send links instead of actual email attachments

Within Outlook instead of attaching a large file, you can simply insert the link which will allow the recipient to download the file that’s stored in the cloud. When the email is sent, Outlook will automatically grant edit permissions to whoever is receiving the email. You’ll still change permissions at any time.

Ensure your team is leveraging the many features and tools built into Office 365

We’ve just discussed a few of the many features that are built into Office 365 for companies looking to boost collaboration and productivity. Should you have any questions about the Office 365 migration process, or just about any of the Office 365 apps we’ve mentioned here, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team today.