Microsoft Office Features You Should Be Using but Didn’t Know About

Microsoft Office Features You Should Be Using but Didn’t Know About

Now delivered as part of the Office 365 brand, Microsoft Office has been the industry standard in productivity software for nearly three decades. By now, you’re probably aware of the cloud-based versions of the world’s favorite desktop productivity suite, but there’s still a lot more to Office than meets the eye. Here are some features you should be using but probably don’t know about:

Office 365 Coauthoring

If you’ve ever used the exclusively web-based Google Docs or Sheets, then you’re probably already familiar with real-time document coauthoring and the tremendous collaborative advantages it brings. However, multiple employees working on the same document at the same time is also now possible with Microsoft Office. All you need is a shared document storage program like OneDrive, and then you can set permissions to allow other members of your team to view or edit your documents.

Chat while Editing

Combined with the coauthoring capabilities of Office 365, the ability to chat while editing makes collaboration a breeze. Now that Skype is included in the Microsoft suite of applications, you can chat with everyone working on the document even without alt-tabbing out of the program. All you need to do is click on the ‘chat’ button while coauthoring a document, and you’ll be able to communicate with them in real time, either by voice or instant message.

Declutter Your Inbox

Cluttered inboxes, even if they aren’t inundated with spam, are still a bane on workplace productivity. Fortunately, Outlook provides a useful but lesser-known set of features to help you regain control over your inbox. By selecting the Rules button in the Home menu of Outlook, you’ll be able to set up rules that automatically sort incoming messages and place them into folders of different categories. Low-priority messages will be sent directly to the Clutter folder.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Most computer users know a few of the basic keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl+S to save a document, but there’s so much more. Moreover, every major new edition of Office introduces new keyboard shortcuts. In Office 2010 and later, it’s also possible to assign your own keyboard shortcuts by navigating to the program options followed by ‘Customize Ribbon’ and ‘Customize’ beside where it says ‘Keyboard Shortcuts.’ Just be careful not to unintentionally reassign any existing combinations!

PowerPoint Visuals

PowerPoint is the industry-standard for creating eye-catching business presentations complete with text, images, and various other elements. You can easily include one or two images with each slide, but with the PowerPoint Designer feature, you can add more images and various other enhancements. There’s also a color extraction and matching feature that uses the included images’ colors to automatically choose a color for each slide’s theme for a more aesthetically pleasing look.

Office Secure Score

Failing to notice a potential security vulnerability could leave your business open to a potentially disastrous data breach. That’s why you always need to know where you stand against the endless tide of online threats. The new Office 365 Secure Score feature provides a simple overview of your existing security configuration by way of a score out of a total possible number of points based on the features available in your Office 365 subscription plan.

Excel Power Map

These days, companies need to work with increasingly enormous data sets, which can quickly reach the point where they become practically impossible to track manually. As such, the ability to correctly visualize such data is paramount to garnering useful insights into what it means. The Excel Power Map feature provides a cutting-edge 3D visualization of temporal and geographical data, making it ideal for plotting supplier stock, demographic information, and more.

Fluid Networks helps you eliminate the hassle of buying and maintaining your own software by providing a complete cloud-based office that your team can access from anywhere. Call us today if you’re ready to take productivity to the next level.