Work smarter with Office 365
The full suite of Office 365 applications (apps) has now been made available to all staff and Postgraduate Researchers.
Log-on to Office 365 to see the range of apps, which will help you collaborate with colleagues on and off campus, store and share files and work more productively.
In addition to the standard productivity suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.), there are a number of apps you might not have come across before.
We’ll be providing more information about all the apps during the coming months, including introductory workshops, starting with Microsoft Teams. Look out for more information in future editions of the All Staff e-newsletter.
What can I do with the apps?
Collaborate
Microsoft Teams will help you collaborate with colleagues on and off campus. It has all the functionality of Skype for Business (which it will eventually replace) plus a lot more. Teams allows you to work more effectively as a team, it offers a convenient way to share files with your colleagues and gives you the ability to hold conversations via instant messaging within your Team, or with individuals.
Yammer is a social networking tool for the University. You can discuss ideas and share updates with colleagues. It is based around groups, or communities of practice, which anyone in the University can create. It tends to be used informally, for quite large groups, and people may not read Yammer posts every day. Sign up to join.
Store and share your files
OneDrive for Business gives you 5TB of storage – that’s enough to store 2,500 hours of video, 85,000 hours of music or millions of documents, presentations or spreadsheets. It lets you share, comment and co-create files with colleagues at the University and beyond. Think of OneDrive as your personal storage area, but with the advantage that you can easily share files if you need to.
Plan
Microsoft Planner is a shared task manager with a cards-based layout, used for groups of two or more people. It’s a way to organise teamwork and tasks and provides a hub for team members to create plans, organise and assign tasks to different users and to check updates on progress through dashboards.
If you need to organise your own work (rather than a team’s work), Microsoft To-Do is a simple and intelligent to-do list that makes it easy to plan your day.
Create
Microsoft Sway lets you create interactive presentations. It's a cloud-based, story-telling application with a simple drag-and-drop interface that is easier to use than PowerPoint and lets you create engaging, visually-based stories rather than simply slide after slide of bullet points.
Automate
Use Microsoft Flow to set up automated workflows between more than a hundred Microsoft applications, including Outlook, Tasks, Twitter and Pinterest, to synchronize files and updates, get notifications and more.
Microsoft Forms is an online tool for creating surveys, questionnaires and quizzes. It’s ideal for simple surveys, quizzes and feedback forms.
Discover
Delve searches through all your Office 365 content (in your OneDrive for Business folders, SharePoint, Yammer and Outlook) and displays things you are working on at the moment or may be relevant to you.
Accessible
Office 365 has a wide range of accessibility features built-in, such as ‘Immersive Reader’ – a tool aimed at readers of other languages or students with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, but useful for anyone who needs help focusing when reading text on screen. There are ‘ease of access’ options, such as a screen magnifier, high contrast themes and keyboard options. Teams supports many accessibility features, including live captions in meetings. And to make sure your documents are accessible, use the Accessibility Checker in Word.
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