How Microsoft 365 tips can skyrocket your business success!
Millions of individuals and businesses widely use Microsoft 365. This productivity suite includes popular applications for device management, advanced security measures, and robust cloud services. While your employees use these Microsoft 365 applications daily, are they making the most of it? This article discusses some valuable Microsoft 365 productivity tips to help your employees maximize their potential and achieve greater efficiency in their daily tasks.
1. Enhance The Focus Of Your Inbox
- Globally, a staggering 269 billion emails are sent each day. Until recently, a simple yet effective Microsoft Office 365 solution called Clutter tackled overflowing inboxes. This handy tool organizes inbox by automatically sorting low-priority conversations, spam, and unwanted messages into a designated clutter folder, leaving the main inbox for more urgent emails. However, Clutter is now replaced by the sleeker, more sophisticated Focused Inbox. This advanced tool assesses email priority based on your interactions and the content of the email.
As a result, the inbox is split into two tabs: ‘Focused’ and ‘Other.’ For instance, emails containing actionable information from colleagues appear in the ‘Focused’ tab, while newsletters or machine-generated emails land in the ‘Other’ tab, allowing you to read or delete them at your convenience. Although you’ll receive notifications for emails in the ‘Other’ tab, this Microsoft Office 365 feature is designed to save you time by reducing the need to sift through a flood of emails and instead prioritize your digital communication and workload.
2. Leverage The Full Potential Of OneNote
- OneNote is a lesser-known Microsoft Office 365 productivity tool that simplifies task management. Functioning as a digital notebook, Microsoft OneNote assists in prioritizing to-do lists by seamlessly integrating them into your workflow. This helps you maintain focus and accomplish tasks more efficiently.
The latest versions of OneNote come with enhanced Outlook integration, including features like:
- Meeting management
- Touch screen capabilities
- Advanced search filters for immediate results
- Collaborative tools that allow real-time co-authoring of notebooks, including file attachments
In addition, OneNote pairs effectively with third-party apps like Office Lens. This free software, available on iOS and Android, transforms your smartphone’s camera into a portable scanner. Take a picture of a whiteboard or an important document after a meeting, and the app automatically transfers it to OneNote, ensuring optimized readability, safe storage, and easy organization.
3. Optimize Your Word Documents
Collaboration is a fundamental aspect of modern enterprises. In addition to various collaboration tools, Office 365 offers real-time co-authoring capabilities for its global Microsoft Office user community. With the help of an integrated sidebar, you can effortlessly save files to OneDrive or SharePoint directly from within Word, instantly sharing them with others while keeping track of changes in real time.
This eliminates the need to switch back and forth between applications. Much like the Tell Me feature, you can further enhance your efficiency in Word by conducting web searches directly from the Office application. Right-click on a word or phrase, and select Smart Lookup. Powered by Bing, a search window will appear within your Word document, allowing you to enter your query and start your web search without leaving your document.
4. Optimize Your Approach: Ignoring vs. Attaching
- Microsoft 365 goes beyond the Office apps to boost your overall productivity. Knowing when to use the ignore feature and when to attach files can make your work with Microsoft 365 more efficient. This tip is especially helpful when using Outlook. During a busy workday, never-ending “reply-all” email chains can get inconvenient and time-consuming. Microsoft 365’s “Ignore” feature is like Google’s Mute button that moves unwanted messages from your Outlook inbox to the trash.
Open the conversation, go to the Home tab, and click Ignore in the Delete group to use this time-saving trick in Microsoft 365. You can easily rejoin the conversation by clicking “Stop ignoring” when you change your mind. In addition, instead of attaching files directly to emails, save your document in Office 365 and send an email through Outlook with a link to the file in the cloud. Outlook will automatically give the recipient permission to access the file. You can also change settings to control whether they can view or edit it whenever you like.
5. Become a PowerPoint Pro
- While you may have refined your PowerPoint creation process using handy Office shortcuts, it’s essential to ask: how polished your slides look? Office 365 has time-saving tips and features like PowerPoint Designer to give your presentations extra design flair. Instead of struggling with makeshift graphic design skills, this handy feature offers smart Office 365 hacks, suggesting the best placement for your chosen image in the document. Another valuable tool for enhancing your business presentations is PowerPoint Morph.
It adds captivating and smooth slide animations and is surprisingly easy to use. Duplicate a slide, move your icons around on the second slide, and play the slideshow. The result looks like a GIF with icons and 3D shapes moving around, and you don’t need any personal programming skills to achieve it. Tell Me is an Office feature that helps you explore without the hassle of switching between programs. You can find Tell Me in PowerPoint and all other Office 365 programs. Unlike other “help” search boxes, Tell Me doesn’t just point you in the right direction. It gives you clickable action items directly in the search results.
6. Elevate Your Business Documents with Templafy
- Templafy, a Template Management Software with deep Office integration, revolutionizes the document creation process by significantly reducing the time it takes to create documents using dynamic templates. Instead of starting from scratch, employees can select pre-approved, best-practice company templates directly within any Office program. This award-winning and industry-recognized service automatically updates document templates with the correct company data and visual elements.
This makes it easy for employees to adhere to branding guidelines and maintain compliance. Hosted in the cloud and compatible with all Microsoft Office platforms and devices, Templafy ensures that business templates are instantly accessible, no matter where or when they are needed. In addition, due to Templafy, Brand Managers can focus their resources on brand development rather than constantly monitoring brand compliance. Templafy platform keeps their teams up-to-date with the latest brand regulations, freeing them from the burdensome task of oversight.
Ready to take charge of your workforce and streamline your workflows? Contact Henson Group today to learn how our Microsoft 365 solutions can help improve the reliability and performance of your IT systems. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and insights in the cloud industry by subscribing to our blog and newsletter. Sign up now and let our experts help you optimize your business operations!