The majority of us “business-folk” live and breath Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and now Microsoft Teams. However, we often tend to forget that Microsoft 365 is a productivity and collaboration giant that is jammed full of applications that can improve your workday. Built with the goal of making work more collaborative and less tedious, there are several Microsoft 365 applications that you likely have access to but may not be using nearly enough (or at all).
Most businesses purchased Microsoft 365 for access to Microsoft’s core productivity suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook), however, Microsoft didn’t stop there. Below are 6 Microsoft 365 applications to consider adding to your daily repertoire.
Forms
Built as a replacement to the cumbersome and mega feature rich Microsoft InfoPath, Forms is a very basic tool for creating quizzes, surveys, and questionnaires. The genius of Forms is its simplistic and easy to use format, which can win over even your most non-tech savvy employees. Once you create a new form, you can easily share it through a link, on Teams, of through an email. Answers are collected and collated into easy-to-read visuals, making the overall process pleasant, easy, and pretty.
While you have probably used Forms a few times, you should consider integrating it into your existing processes more. Here are a few possible use cases:
- As part of your pre-sales process to collect requirements from prospects
- Find out which products your customers are most interested in
- Ahead of big strategy meetings to find out which topics people want to discuss
- As a method of collecting data on a new product or initiative
- To collect feedback from team members who recently attended an online conference
- To gage your onboarding process by surveying new hires after their first week
- Collect client testimonials for sales and marketing purposes
- Collect requirements during a new project such as a laptop refresh
Overall, Forms is a quick and handy tool that can do wonders on its own or be integrated with other Microsoft tools to create powerful workflows and automated processes.
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Power Automate
Power Automate is one of the less frequently used Microsoft 365 applications that can quickly become a primary tool for your business. Designed to automate procedures and processes in other Microsoft 365 applications, Power Automate is a great way to automate tasks relating to SharePoint, Forms, Teams, and much more. For example, Power Automate can be used to collect responses from a survey on Forms, instantly notify a group of people that the survey was completed, send a thank you email to the user who filled out the Form, and then instantly populate a SharePoint list with the results.
Power Automate can take a bit of time to get used to, but it does come with several prebuilt workflows, such as automating time off requests, notifying people when a document is altered or checked out in SharePoint, and much more.
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Power BI
Power BI is Microsoft’s rising star. Designed to present easy to consume data in a pleasing and informative way, Microsoft’s answer to Business Intelligence is set to become a must have solution for every business. While many third-party applications have business intelligence dashboards, Power BI can combine several data sets into one dashboard, allowing you to have one home for all of your data visualization needs. Power BI dashboards are actually fairly simple to create and solve the problem of finding quick answers to commonly asked questions in your business.
Planner
If you are a big Microsoft Teams user, then you have probably started using planner. Planner is a simple and effective way to track action items from meetings, view the status of a project, and organize your team. Planner has several different views to suit your needs, and instantly sends out reminders when a task is assigned to a user. Planner is also a great remote work solution, as it can help you collaborate on projects easily from anywhere.
To Do
To Do is Microsoft’s digital answer to the old school planner notebook. It allows you to track your tasks, share lists with other people, and stay focused on core projects and initiatives. Since it is a Microsoft 365 application, it easily integrated with Outlook, allowing you to add flagged emails to your list of “to-dos.”
Bookings
Books is a Microsoft 365 Application that was designed to save time when scheduling meetings. Bookings can be used to allow customers to schedule appointments and will automatically send reminders and sync with your outlook calendar.
Conclusion
Microsoft 365 applications are constantly evolving and growing. Since you are already likely paying for several of these applications and not using them, it is worth a few minutes of time to play around and see what other Microsoft 365 applications can help you stay productive.
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