Office 365 - How to stay up to date
It’s been estimated that people only use 5% of the functionality in Office 365. This has many reasons, people have busy jobs and so on, but one of the key reasons is because Office 365 is an evergreen product, which means it’s constantly changing and having new functionality added (and in some cases removed.)
Knowing the more advanced functionality can have a huge impact on people’s productivity at work, so it behoves everyone to keep training and educating themselves on this platform. (If you’re using it of course.)
There are many ways to do this, from asking colleagues how to do something rather then asking them to do it, to lunch training sessions, online courses and so on. It all comes down to your time, and the reward you may get from investing in yourself by learning.
One easy argument and example to make is would you rather spend a day cut and pasting data from the web into Excel, or would you prefer to open Excel and import the data directly from the website? (See: Connect to a webpage (Power Query))
So, you probably agree it’s good to keep up to date, but how do you do it?
I use two methods:
What’s new in Office 365, See: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/what-s-new-in-office-365-95c8d81d-08ba-42c1-914f-bca4603e1426
This gives you updates on what’s changed as you patch Office, giving you information on new functionality you can take advantage of.
Search and Insert Icons:
Auto-Complete and Syntax Coloring in Power Query:
The other way is using the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, See: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap
This provides a GIGANTIC amount of information, so it’s worthwhile to filter down to the one or two tools you’re interested in.
I’m an Excel, Outlook and Teams guy, filtering on those shows the following:
That’s still to much, and I only really want to spend 5 minutes on this, so let’s filter further by features which have Launched.
So what’s new that I might be interested in:
Microsoft Teams - Broadcast Meetings
This is one of the SfB meeting capabilities coming to Teams to enable large townhall-style meetings with Microsoft Teams. This feature is targeted for availability by Q2 CY 2019. Now called "Live Events" in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams - @-less mentions
Get someone's attention in a channel conversation or a group chat with @-less mentions. Simply start typing a person's name starting with a capital letter and select the right contact from the list of suggestions. They will receive a notification, which they can click to go directly into the point in the conversation where they were mentioned.
Microsoft Teams - Channel Moderation
Drive focused conversations within your organization with Microsoft Teams. Channel moderation gives team owners and members who have been added as moderators exclusive rights to create new posts in the channel and control whether team members can reply.
Excel - Six powerful new functions
We’ve added six new functions to use with Dynamic Arrays to supercharge your spreadsheets: FILTER, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE and RANDARRAY.
I garuntee some of those features will come in handy, and I will even use some of them immediately, @-less mentions for one, making me more efficient, so I can do the work I enjoy doing.
Now I’m all done, and off to my next meeting… why don’t you try it and see if you learn anything?
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