Microsoft 365 has become a staple of remote working, allowing thousands and thousands of businesses to make the transition to remote working with ease. Many of you will already be familiar with Microsoft 365’s core features that allow you to draft up letters, create graphs, and video chat for a good five minutes before realising you’ve been on mute the whole time. However, Microsoft 365 has a wealth of features that could enhance your remote working experience even further. Here are ten Microsoft 365 features you may not have heard of.
Chatting with the team whilst in Office apps
With some of Microsoft Team’s great in-app integrations, you can actually be having a chat, whether by text, audio, or video, all whilst you’re working on a Word document or a spreadsheet. This is extremely helpful if you’re going through reports in Excel or perhaps putting the finishing touches to a PowerPoint presentation for an important meeting.
Power Map in Excel
If your work has any link to geography or demography, then this feature will be of tremendous use. Power Map is a feature on Excel that uses data relating to geography and transforms your rows of boring data into a 3D interactive map. This will enable you and your team to visualise your data in new and exciting ways, whilst seeming like actual magic to your impressed boss.
Team Collaboration
Going back and forth on the editing of a document can be very time-consuming. With Microsoft 365, you can actually collaborate on a document in real-time, discussing, and making edits as you go. This is a tool that can be used by multiple people, allowing whole teams to collaborate on work without having to be in the same room.
Resume Reading in Word
If you’re prone to start reading a document and then be distracted by another hundred seemingly equally important tasks – this feature is for you. Word automatically bookmarks the last page you were reading, so that when you come back to it, it reminds you and saves you scrolling for ages to remember where you got to.
Freedom to Work from any Device
One of the most amazing things about Microsoft 365 is that you can use Office Web Apps. This allows you to access your cloud-stored files and work from the internet on any device from anywhere in the world, without having to download and install the Office suite. This type of flexibility and freedom has been a real gift for companies looking to make the switch to remote working.
Microsoft Planner
Microsoft 365 is the gift that keeps on giving. Whilst we all know about its core programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – did you know that 365 has its own task management software? Not just that, but it’s genuinely very good. Microsoft Planner allows you and your team to manage workflows and collaborate on tasks, seeing projects through to the end.
Magic Inboxes
Okay, well not exactly magic – but as good as. Microsoft Outlook has a clutter feature that will use your mailbox rules to automatically organise and declutter your inbox so that your most important emails are visible first. Hands up if your inbox needs magic de-cluttering technology? That’s what we thought!
PDF Editing
This feature allows you to convert a PDF into a Word document without encountering the expected formatting issues that you usually get when slowly copying and pasting in chunks at a time. Edit your document and then re-save it as a PDF. Simple but a huge help!
OneNote
There’s something nice about making handwritten notes in a notebook, sure. However, when you later need to find that one number you wrote 3 weeks ago, it becomes not so nice. OneNote is an in-built digital notebook, that allows you to categorise and search your notes. On top of this, you can even turn notes into calendar events with the click of a button!
Sending Praise and Recognition
One of the moments lost with remote working is face-to-face praise when the boss walks into the room to the hushing of the team, only to reveal the great work of someone in the room. This lovely moment can now be replicated on Microsoft Teams by assigning a badge of praise to a particular team member and posting it to a public channel. This allows the rest of the team to send virtual high fives and enables the morale of the team to grow, even whilst apart.
