8 Office 365 Productivity Features You’ve Never Heard Of

Published on 29 December 2017

Microsoft Office 365, also known as Microsoft Office Productivity Suite, is Microsoft’s answer to the multitude of online productivity suites such as Zoho apps, GApps and others that replete the market today. In Office 365, Microsoft has integrated the ubiquitous MS Office with the cloud to create a robust productivity suite that is designed to drastically improve the productivity of businesses. Office 365 marks a revolutionary step in the direction of achieving complete harmony between teams, whether they are located in the same office or elsewhere. Here are some ways in which Office 365 can transform the way in which businesses operate and make them more efficient.

8 Cool Features You Should Be Using in Office 365

1. Real-Time Co-Authoring

With Office 365, you don’t have to wait for your team members to finish working on their Word Docs or PPTs to see what they are doing. You can do it in real time. That’s right. You can see what they are doing, and even contribute. This ingenious feature allows team members to collaborate in a way that was previously not possible. Real-time co-authoring is a seamless experience that transcends platforms. In other words, you could be using a totally different set of devices with different operating systems. You can still collaborate in real time.

2. Simplified Document Sharing

Microsoft has bestowed the Office 365 suite with the one-click-sharing feature. Want to share a document with your colleague? Just click on the Share button at the top right corner, and select the contact from your list. This kind of simplicity is pervasive throughout the Office 365 suite, making it far easier and faster for team members to work together like a well-oiled machine. Clearly, the Office 365 service is designed for new age businesses for whom time is of the essence.

3. Large File Sharing on OneDrive

Imagine a platform that combines the best things you love about enterprise file sync and sharing into one robust cloud storage and sharing service. That’s OneDrive. In one fell swoop, OneDrive has captured the simplicity and large storage capacity to create an unbeatable enterprise file sync and sharing service that marks a significant milestone in cloud. The best thing about Office 365 is that it seamlessly integrates these features into MS Office, a productivity suite that everyone is already familiar with. There is no learning curve here, which means that the businesses do not have to waste time on getting comfortable with the platform.

4. Improved Versioning

Creativity and ingenuity are complex processes. They hardly ever work in a linear fashion. Naturally, this leads to the creation of multiple versions of a single document, and good ideas can be lost in all the mess, rendering it impossible to recover them at a later point. Well, that’s not a problem with Office 365. The platform boasts of a markedly improved versioning system, which allows users to go into the history section and recover past versions of a file. No good ideas are lost with Office 365.

5. Smart Lookup

Microsoft brings the Smart Lookup feature of the MS Office to Office 365. This feature combines the ease of Office 2016 with the powerful search ability of Bing to create a seamless experience for users within the Office 365 apps. Users can click on a word, phrase, or sentence and use the Smart Lookup feature to get instant references from Bing, including definitions, Wiki pages, and more.

6. Bring Office Groups to Outlook

The Groups feature allows Outlook users to manage their emails in delightful ways. It singlehandedly does away with messy email chains, mountains of emails in the inbox, and the need to sift through all of them. Users can create groups for their colleagues, teams, and even for their family members. Each group comes with some fantastic add-on features like shared inbox, calendar, OneNote, and even a shared file repository. This is how new age teams collaborate seamlessly.

7. New Charts

Charts condense mountains of data into an easily understandable visual form. But, the old chart types that are available in the previous versions of Excel significantly limited the ability of the users to present their data, analysis, and insights in a more coherent and impactful way. Microsoft has since added plenty of new amazing chart types – Sunburst, Box and Whisker, Histogram, Pareto, and Treemap – that make the businesses smarter, and maybe even cooler.

8. One-Click Forecasting

Excel has always been one of the most widely used tools for forecasting everything from financial markets to market share. However, it is no mean task to generate complex forecasts out of the colossal amounts of data that businesses collect – the new One-Click Forecasting function is a powerful solution to this age-old problem. This feature makes use of a standard forecasting algorithm to generate reliable forecasts that are free from human forecasting errors. Moreover, the fact that there is now an industry standard for creating forecasts, enabling decision-makers – mainly the top management and the Board – to have a fixed format against which they can compare different forecasts. Questions like why different methods are deviating in their forecasts will help address important aspects of business operations, allowing the decision makers to be more aware of the state of operations in their own business.

Final Thoughts

Office 365 brings a paramount shift in the way that teams work together. It reduces friction, improves collaboration, and boosts productivity of businesses in an unprecedented way. Most important of all, it is designed for every type of business out there small, medium, large, work-from-home, or other. Businesses have the flexibility of choosing what they need and only use those features of the Office 365 suite.

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Tags: Microsoft, Office 365, Productivity,

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