5 things you didn’t know Office 365 could do for your business

Everyone knows about Office 365 hosting your business data, but it’s more than just a great place to host your email, calendar and contacts. Here are 5 things Office 365 can help with your business that you may not know about.

Office on all of your devices

Did you know you can get Office on your smartphone and tablet? Editing Excel documents on your phone may be cumbersome but you do at least have the option. There is an app for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote just for starters. This is invaluable for staff working outside the office to allow them to contribute while offsite.

Real Time Typing

Multiple people can edit a document at the same time in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The best part about this is you can watch the changes occur in real time and see which of your staff are making those changes and chat to them – inside the document! A big benefit of this is stopping “Attachment Rage” in your Outlook as you search to find the latest version of a document, and hoping beyond hope that a team member hasn’t made changes to the section you are working on.

De-Clutter your Inbox

Here’s a great feature to ensure the important messages that reach your inbox are not lost in all that email “white noise”. It’s called “Clutter” but I would have thought “De-clutter” would have been a better name. Clutter works by “watching” and learning from your actions inside Outlook. It detects which messages are important and need actioning and keeps them in your inbox. It also detects which messages are less important and moves them to the “Clutter” folder. Over time, “Clutter” gets smarter as refines its rules. It’s turned off by default but you can turn it on by following the instructions here.

Open PDF in Word for editing

How many times have you asked your IT department to “make this PDF a Word document?”. This used to happen all the time to us, but not any more. Word now allows you to open a PDF document inside Word, and after a short conversion process, that PDF document is now an editable Word document! A word of warning, the conversion doesn’t always work 100% how you would expect it, so a little reformatting may be required. PDFs that are protected cannot be convert in Word.

Excel Power Map (requires Pro Plus)

We’ve left the most powerful feature until last. Excel’s Power Map feature takes rows and columns of location data and generates 3D maps of that data. You could have lists of customers, warehouses of supplier stock, demographic information, or electricity consumption in Melbourne. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you have an address or suburb or state you can map it. You will need the Pro Plus version of Excel to use this feature. See some examples of Power Map here.

These are a few of the many features your business may find useful together with the business class email hosting you receive when you host your email with Office 365. For information on switching over to Office 365 visit our Office 365 Migration page.