Here’s How CTECH Consulting Group Supports Your Use of Microsoft Office 365

We Have the Microsoft Office 365 Business Tips to Help You Maximize Your Cloud Computing Productivity

CTECH Consulting Group routinely consults people in businesses throughout the global marketplace on how to maximize their IT productivity. Specific to many who are trying to optimize their cloud computing productivity, we have some amazing Microsoft Office 365 Business tips that will greatly boost your employee collaboration factor and output.

Here are some of the best MS Office 365 Business tips for you we could conjure up (and there are more):

Multiple people can edit the same document at once.

Everyone can edit a document at the same time in Word, PowerPoint or Excel. You can see the changes as they make them and who is doing the editing.

No more emailing attachments. Everyone can just pile on and work at once.

By the way, while this feature is new for Office 365, it’s not unique to

Skype with co-workers while working on a document.

In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be rolling out a feature that lets you simply click a “Chat” button to begin chatting with everyone working in the document over Skype.

Even if you leave the Office document, you’ll be able to continue the conversation via Skype on your desktop or phone, so can keep talking to the team as they make edits.

Link to files, don’t attach them.

If your company uses a business edition of Office 365, here’s a nifty trick for sharing a file. Upload your file to Office 365’s cloud storage. Fire up the cloud version of Outlook (known as Outlook Web App) and, instead of attaching a file, link to the file on your cloud.

This isn’t unique to Microsoft Office 365 Business — all cloud storage services allow you to share documents via links. But Outlook will automatically grant edit permission to the people you are emailing. (You can change their permissions, too.)

Use two Microsoft cloud storage accounts on your Android phone.

Microsoft has created an app called the OneDrive app for Android.

It lets you use both your corporate Microsoft cloud storage (OneDrive for Business) and your personal Microsoft cloud storage (OneDrive) from a single app.

Just toggle between them.

Turn notes into calendar items.

You can use Microsoft’s note-taking tool, OneNote, inside of Microsoft Outlook.

So, if you write a to-do list in OneNote, you can easily convert it to a bunch of tasks with deadlines and reminders on your calendar.

You can automatically add calendar meeting details like date, location, topic, agenda and attendees, to your notes. Then you can email the meetings notes to you team using the “Email Page” button.

Let Bing automatically find images for your presentations.

While you can still do old-fashioned PowerPoints with Office 365 Business Edition, Microsoft is testing a cloud presentation software that’s more like Prezi than PowerPoint.

It’s called Sway.

Right now, Sway is in invitation only preview mode, though it’s easy to request an invite. One thing it has done is to stitch together Sway with Bing image search. Bing will read your presentation and suggest images based on the words you are using.

Convert scribbles to text and drawings.

When you scribble handwritten notes into OneNote on a device that supports electronic ink (OneNote, Samsung Galaxy Note, etc.) OneNote has to sort of guess which lines belong together.

If it guesses wrong, you can easily fix it with the Lasso tool.

Choose Lasso Select, circle an area of your note and then you can edit it or use the “Ink to Text” or “Math” option to change the scribbles into regular text and numbers.

Teach your inbox to de-clutter itself.

Both Microsoft and Google are trying to offer machine learning technology to surface important emails from a world full of spam.

Google has the “Priority Inbox.” Microsoft is starting to roll out its version called “Clutter.” Clutter takes any and all rules you have set up for your inbox and uses them. You then train it by marketing messages as clutter.

It will then start to automatically move less important messages into the “Clutter” folder for you to read or delete later. This feature will be set live in the next few weeks, Microsoft says.

Ignore annoying reply-all conversations.

With both Google and Microsoft Office 365, you can stop seeing annoying “reply all” email conversations. With Google you click something called the “mute” button.

In Microsoft Office 365 Business, this is called the “Ignore” button.

By the way, this isn’t a new feature. Folks using Outlook 2010 also have the Ignore button. But it’s a great trick all the same.

Add a signature to an email.

A free electronic signature app from the king of such apps, DocuSign, is available for Outlook.

So, if you are stilling printing documents, signing them, then scanning or (heaven forbid) faxing them, this app will let you go beyond all that.

The app walks you through electronically signing and emailing a document and can help gather signatures from others, if needed.

Turn your mouse icon into a laser pointer.

If you are giving a presentation the old-fashioned way, using PowerPoint, and you don’t have a laser pointer, you can use your PC’s mouse as a fake one.

You simply tell PowerPoint to change the mouse icon into a little red dot.

This isn’t a new feature for Microsoft Office 365 Business. Older versions do this, too. But Microsoft did include this feature in the version of Office that runs on the iPad released earlier this year.

Even though the iPad doesn’t use a mouse, if you hold your finger or stylus down on the iPad, the red button fake laser pointer will appear.

Turn rows of data into a map.

The latest version of Excel includes a cool new feature called the Power Map.

It helps convert rows of data into images. And if that data is geographic in nature, such as county-by-county lists for a state, Power Map will put it on a 3D map.

Excel charts, graphs, pivot tables made easy.

The power of Excel is in how easily it turns data into charts. With the latest version of Microsoft Office 365 Business, this function has been beefed up.

Microsoft has collected all the ways you can format your data into a feature called “Quick Analysis.”

Select the cells, fire up the Quick Analysis tool and click through your options for visually presenting the material: charts, totals, tables and spark lines (tiny line charts), etc.

Let Excel reformat your data.

You know how powerful Excel’s Fill Down “Control -D” command is? The new version of Microsoft Office 365 Business has something that practically reads your mind, called Flash Fill.

With Flash Fill Excel sees what you are doing and does the rest of it for you.

For example, say you are changing the formatting of a list of people’s

Edit a PDF file.

If someone sends you a PDF that you’d like to convert into a Word document to edit, you can. Just open it and respond “OK” when it asks you if you to convert the PDF. This will prevent the formatting problems associated with editing or copying and pasting from the PDF.

You can also save a Word file as a PDF (click File > Export > Create PDF/XPS), or save just a portion of a file as a PDF (select a page range). And you can password-protect the PDF, too.

And, those are some of the key ways you can take advantage of Microsoft Office 365 Business and ramp-up your cloud computing connectivity.

But, there’s much more to learn about this great productivity platform, and CTECH Consulting Group is here to show you how to make the most of it.

Let CTECH Consulting Group Be Your Microsoft Office 365 Business Guides

Call us at (403) 457-1478 or email us at info@ctechgroup.net for more information on this, and having the kind of Microsoft Office 365 Business consultant in Calgary who can propel your cloud connectivity and business growth to new levels of prosperity!

Ready To Take Microsoft Office 365 Out For A Spin?

Let CTECH Consulting Group Be Your Professional Office 365 Guide.

Sign Up For A Free Demo Of Microsoft’s Powerful Cloud Application.

Your Information Is Safe With Us. CTECH Consulting Group will never sell, rent, share or distribute your personal details with anyone. In addition, we will never spam you.

Written by Carl Fransen

posted on October 20, 2017

Carl Fransen

My passion is to make my mark on the world in a positive and lasting way. I want to set an example for my son that his father can compete with integrity in today’s world, be very successful, and leave the world a better place for him.

Combining my technical/business-based education with a long career steadily progressing up the corporate ladder, I decided to build a company that held true to my values. So, I founded and designed the next generation of IT support firm: CTECH Consulting Group Inc. We are a completely automated, cloud-based IT company designed to compete against any other IT firm without the overhead. We promote a lifestyle to all our staff where they can work anywhere, at any time, access any information on any device that is relevant to their job, and collaborate with anyone they want to.