Over half of all organisations are using Microsoft 365 to help run their business, and mastering the latest productivity hacks is a guaranteed way to work smarter and get the most functionality out of your software. Your organisation likely uses some of 365 suite every day, and here are some of our favourite features for you to check out next time you log on.

Take Advantage of Co-authoring

With Microsoft 365 and OneDrive or SharePoint, you can share a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, or PowerPoint presentation so that multiple people can work together on it. Real time collaboration on documents prevents you from losing track of who is working on what and when. This allows people to work together no matter where they are physically.

Utilise Cloud Links with SharePoint Instead of Attachments

While the norm for lots of us is still to attach documents to emails, by instead sending SharePoint links you can have more control over who has access to your files both within and outside of your organisation. By sending a live link to a collaborative document, you can also co-author, which stops you from sending lots of different versions of the same document back and forth.

Share Directly from Outlook to Teams

Seamlessly share between two core communication apps by sharing emails directly to Teams:

1. Open the email you want to share with your team.
2. In the toolbar ribbon, select the Share to Teams.
3. Choose the person, group, or channel you want to share your email.
4. If you want to add a note, you can type and mention people like you would a normal message.
5. Click the Share button and then carry on with the conversation in Microsoft Teams.

See our how-to video for more information.

Improve Reading Experiences and Make Multi-tasking Easier

Immersive Reader allows you to adjust email text in a way that works best for you. You can update the formatting of the text including column width, page, and font colour, text spacing and font size. This can be found under the ‘View’ tab of applications. See our how-to guide here.

You can also use Read Aloud to listen to emails being read out loud as each word is highlighted. This is great if you struggle with reading, but it is also a brilliant way to proofread your work. This way you hear exactly how it sounds to others that would read your work. It means you will pick up mistakes and incorrect word use more easily. This can be found under the ‘Review’ tab of applications.

Keep all Your Notes in One Place with OneNote

Microsoft’s OneNote is an app used for storing information and taking notes. In it, you can create notebooks that allow you to store links, save photos and drawings and write with a stylus, keeping all your notes in one accessible spot. Notebooks have unlimited pages and sections to customise and update as needed, and they can be even shared as a useful co-authoring source for your organisation.

Mention Someone

When working from home, one of the things many people miss is being able to pop to someone’s desk. A mention is a way of doing this virtually – just type an ‘@’ before the name of the person you want the attention of. Then in Teams, each person you @mention will get a notification in their activity feed, where they can click directly through to the mention.

You can also do this in Outlook; this will automatically add them to the ‘To’ line of the email or meeting invite, and they’ll see the @ symbol next to the message in their Inbox.

Do Things Quickly with ‘Tell me’

If you ever feel overwhelmed with the number of features that Office 365 has? To stop you from spending hours searching through them all, get to the shortcut you need in the moment by clicking on the ‘Tell me’ button on the main toolbar of 365 applications.

Here you can enter words and phrases about what you want to do next and quickly get to features that you want to use or actions you want to perform.

Organise people with Groups

Creating Office 365 groups allows you to communicate with specific people both within and outside your organisation. Once you create a group, you can share a calendar between the members, exchange files, and conveniently chat. You can create Microsoft 365 Groups from a variety of tools including Outlook, SharePoint, Teams and more.

If you want more insight into how to create groups in Teams, check out our essential guide here.

Get More Out of Microsoft 365 with 848’s Training Courses

The 848 Group is a UK leading cloud provider and IT partner. We design, deliver and support IT services and solutions that enable effective collaboration, communication and connectivity. A key part of our solution delivery and support is end user training.

Technology in your business means new digital skills for your teams to master. It’s essential in the modern working world for employees to have the digital skills and tools in order to work with maximum efficiency, productivity and collaboration capabilities.

We can help you enhance the digital skills within your business and enable your employees to utilise the full features of Microsoft 365 for collaboration. Improve productivity and empower teams to effectively collaborate across Microsoft 365 apps. Our Microsoft 365 for collaboration courses include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook and more.