Best Office 365 Tricks to Help Boost Productivity

We’ve talked about Windows 10 a lot here at The Digital Lifestyle, but there is another Microsoft product that we like just as much: Office 365. The subscription-based productivity suite is quickly becoming everyone’s favourite. There is no need to pay for an expensive license. You also get so much more for your money, including cloud storage and additional tools.

While Office 365 is great out of the box, there are a few tricks and hacks that can help you be more productive while using the suite. We’re going to take a look at a few of those hacks in this article.

Collaborate!

Office 365 now comes with a co-authoring tool that allows you to work on a document together with colleagues or friends. There is no need to go back and forth sending emails and revisions when you need to get a particular document done and approved. You can now invite other Office 365 users directly from the desktop software.

Once the co-authoring function is active and you invite other users to share the document, you can then make edits and synchronise them to all users. You can also use the Office 365 Web Apps to work on shared documents in real-time. This time, other users can see as you make changes to the document directly.

To make it even better, offline users will continue to receive changes once they are back online. The changes made while you’re away will also be synchronised once you return to your Office 365 window. These features make Office 365 a handy collaborative platform to have.

Smarter Emails

Outlook in Office 365 – Outlook 365 with add-ons and extra tools – is smarter than ever. You still get the same, familiar user interface that allows you to access emails easily, but you also get additional tools to work with. For starters, you can now synchronise contacts and notes in one place, without having to open separate apps.

It is also good to know that Outlook now recognises formatting in notes, which means you can create richer notes and share them with your colleagues. Speaking of sharing, sharing attachments – especially large ones – and notes through emails is also easier thanks to the built-in integration with OneDrive and OneNote.

Now that companies such as CertaHosting.co.uk offer Office 365 email hosting as part of their service line-up, you can also set up business emails that work well with Outlook’s new features. Push notifications and other advanced features work out of the box.

Link, Don’t Attach

Office 365 is heavily integrated with Microsoft’s cloud storage service OneDrive, but that means you can now use the cloud service for more things. Instead of attaching files when you want to send documents to colleagues, for instance, it is much more rewarding to upload them to the cloud and link the files.

The shared files will remain in the cloud. As mentioned above, the recipient can make changes to the document directly. You can track those changes and get them instantly thanks to auto-save and real-time sync. More importantly, you can always return to older versions of the file without having to manually save multiple copies.

These tricks on how to use Office 365’s new features and additions will help you be even more productive on the platform. If you want to learn more about Office 365 tricks and hacks, be sure to leave your comments down below.