Making Office 365 Work For You

Office 365 is a great tool for productivity. The entire suite of products are essential for many employees to be able to get their work done. However, there are some ways you can tweak the products to give you even more productivity.

Email Rules

Creating rules inside Outlook can really help you get your email under control. When you set up rules correctly, Outlook can help you organize your inbox automatically. Set up rules to move various emails to specific folders like for individual customers or particular projects you are working on based on words inside the message or based on who they are from. Looking through the different options for email rules can give you great ideas on how you can set them up to get your inbox under control.

Templates

If you are constantly editing a specific file, and saving it as a new file to use the same information between the two, it’s time to create a template for that document. Templates really make it easy to create documents that you use on a frequent basis. You also don’t run the risk of messing up the original document by saving your changes. Templates not only help with documents or letters that you frequently write, you can also set up some templates or responses within your email. Customer service representatives can really take advantage of programming in responses through AutoText that are used frequently during the course of their day. If you find yourself writing the same thing over and over again, it’s definitely time to look for a way to automate that process through templates.

Shortcuts

Learning keyboard shortcuts for the various Office products is a great way to pick up some productivity time. There are also specific shortcuts built into the various products as well. Excel especially has some great ways to change or update multiple cells at once through different mouse movements like clicking the bottom right corner of the cell and dragging it down to repeat the cell.

Automate

Taking the email rules one step further, you can set up Quick Steps in Outlook to apply specific processes to various messages. If you are always forwarding a specific email to a colleague, then creating a task for yourself, and then moving the email to a folder, you can program the entire process within Quick Steps. Let the program do the work for you by automating those processes.

Create Presentations Easily

If PowerPoint terrifies you, there is actually a really easy way to create your slides. Look for the tab within PowerPoint for “Outline” and just lay out your entire presentation in an outline form. The program can take it from there and create your slides for you. No need to worry about the positioning of text boxes or how to create great transitions.

Through these simple tweaks you can really get a handle on your productivity, with a little help from Office 365.