Technology plays a massive role in the day to day running our firm. Within that, Microsoft Office 365 has huge potential to be very effective for your business.
Microsoft and Apple own a combined 93% share of the desktop market in the United Kingdom as of 2019 [www.statista.com]. Microsoft’s operating software - Windows, held 72.81 percent of the market share.
Windows operating system is a common feature for many different companies due to its many different programmes; Outlook for E-mails, Excel for spreadsheets, Word for producing documents, PowerPoint for presentations etc. There are however many more ways you can use Windows to enhance your business efficiency even further:
Dictate
Why not speed up operations and dictate emails or letters? The updated dictate option within Outlook and Word, will help ensure quicker response time to emails and letters. Why would you spend valuable time typing and making corrections when dictate gives you the option to type when you speak? Dictate helps to free up your time so that you can work ON the business, rather than in it.
Dictate option is available for use on Outlook, Word and PowerPoint. At present it not available on Excel. Here’s a little secret… this blog was dictated on Microsoft Word!
OneDrive
OneDrive, which is part of the Office 365 family, will allow you to save files and documents in the Cloud, which you can access from wherever you are in the world. Simply put, the files are saved remotely on a Microsoft cloud server somewhere in ‘digital space’. The added benefit of this is that you do not have to worry about disaster recovery of lost work for your company, as Microsoft will take care of this for you.
OneDrive gives each user 1 terabyte (1TB) of Cloud storage, that's over 6.5 million documents pages, commonly stored as Office files, PDFs and presentations. As an example, you can save 250,000 12MP camera photos, that's an awful lot of storage space by any stretch of the imagination. As long as you don't save large graphic heavy files, then the storage amount provided by OneDrive should be sufficient for many years.
Office 365
Access your e-mail and work programmes from wherever you are. Microsoft market Office 365 as the ‘go to Cloud service’. Once you have signed up for Office 365 you can access your emails 24/7. Due to the easy accessibility, in most cases there’s no need to have a mail server in your office.
Collaborating with anyone, anywhere is one of the key selling points for Microsoft. You can share files and documents with another team member and edit them at the same time.
For example, if you were working on an Excel spreadsheet with another team member for a joint project, you would normally have to work on it independently and then send drafts back and forth via email. Instead, using! Office 365 allows for the same spreadsheet to be simultaneously opened, edited and easily managed across multiple devices.
Version History
There are several other benefits to using Office 365. These include security which helps to protect against data loss and saving time. We also like the option of version control where you can restore a previous version of the file we have been working on, even though it may have been overwritten.
To conclude, Office 365 and it’s cloud-based technology, offers SME’s a wide range of collaboration tools that can help businesses achieve a higher level of productivity. The features mentioned in this blog are only just the start of the full capabilities Office has to offer . Come back for my next blog on these other office 365 applications.
Written by Suda Ratnam
As business grow they often become overburdened and inefficient systems begin to creep in. To ensure you are running the most efficient business possible we will review all of your processes and suggest improvements to make them more effective. If you are interested in a systems review, please email suda.ratnam@raffingers.co.uk
Utilising Office 365 at SME's
Thursday 9 January 2020
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