I don’t know if you had started with Office 365 but recently I had. I can’t tell you great and exciting it is to work with. You might me thinking it would be like the same olda boat you were sailing up till now at your working pace but this is kinda different. Let me show you some how it looks like more productive.
Use the apps on multiple devices
Licensing of Office applications used to be a source of pain and frustration, with despairing comments like “when I have bought Office so why can’t I use it on both of my computers?”. Office 365 has thrown this out. Your Office 365 licence allows you to use all the applications on up to five computers (Windows or Mac, desktop or laptop) plus you can install it on up to five mobile devices (tablets etc) plus five phones. That ought to be enough for anyone.
Work online
The web versions of Word and Excel have been around for several years. If you looked at earlier, you might well have been put off by these very basic products that were slow and had almost none of the features we take for granted in the desktop versions. I can tell you that it’s now safe to look again. Microsoft has been working hard on the web versions and they are genuinely useable products. You really could work entirely in the cloud if you wanted to.
Work offline
The hype tells us that we live in an always-on, always connected world. If 99% of the India population is connected, it’s surprising how often you find yourself in that other 1%. Typically, it’s when you are about to start an important presentation and you just came to know that you have no Internet connection or Wi-fi.
Luckily, you still have the Office applications installed on your system, so nothing is lost. And Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about making your data available offline too. You can easily synchronise data to your PC from all these sources:
- One Drive
- Sharepoint
- Teams
- Outlook Email
Move up to SharePoint
SharePoint Online is the underlying data store for Office 365. It is an enterprise-scale data repository that is packed with great features. Unfortunately, all those features came at a price; SharePoint was quite clunky to work with and it never really took off in the small business market.
With the advent of Office 365, this is changing. Microsoft is building layers of much more usable software over the top of SharePoint. OneDrive for Business and Teams both use SharePoint to store all your data, but you don’t need to see that SharePoint layer underneath.
You are always up to date
The final productivity gain is the easiest, because it is fully automatic. Office 365 keeps the applications up to date for you. Updates and new features simply appear on your computer. It’s a small change to your working life, but it’s one of those 1% marginal gains that make life slightly better.
