By now, most people have heard about Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 toolkit – Office 365 productivity tools. With Office 365, Microsoft has put its most widely used business tools, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, into the cloud, making them accessible anywhere on any device.
You may not know that this new cloud model allows Microsoft to quickly develop new tools and functionality and deliver them directly to customers.
No installation or upgrade is required. And Microsoft is building at an incredible pace, regularly releasing new productivity tools that can save a lot of time for your company.
Here, I will highlight the top three Office 365 productivity tools you didn’t know existed:
Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate (upgraded from Microsoft Flow) is an easy way to build automated tasks management processes for time-consuming, repetitive actions.
Microsoft Power Automate enables users to build and automate processes and actions that save time and effort while doing their repetitive tasks.
The usability of Microsoft Power Automate is to automate workflows between your applications and services to sync files, receive notifications, collect data – and more.
With Microsoft Power Automate, you are able to connect with more than 220 services and manage data from the cloud or home sources.
Microsoft Power Automate integrates with Microsoft solutions that you can already use, such as Office 365, Excel, SharePoint, and Teams, so you can easily deploy and send to your team quickly to work seamlessly with your ongoing tasks.
Furthermore, you can create a flow and perform administrative tasks in a browser, or you can download the Microsoft Power Automate mobile app on your smartphone. Microsoft Power Automate will allow you to receive notifications for all kinds of actions or automated processes. Also Read – Top 10 Best VPN for Windows PC.
Creating a workflow is as simple as selecting a tool (like Outlook, Excel, or SharePoint) from the list and selecting the task you want the device to perform, such as sending a notification when an event occurs, organizing and sharing data syncing files.
Microsoft provides hundreds of templates that make it easy to automate Microsoft Power Automate, such as managing calendars automatically, receiving notifications when a shared file changes, or saving Outlook extensions to OneDrive.
Forms
Microsoft Forms was released in 2016. Since its announcement, updates and features that go beyond simple questions and answers have appeared.
Microsoft Forms is designed as an easy way to create powerful surveys, quizzes, surveys, and other forms in just minutes.
The essential steps of the process include:
- Create form;
- Share form;
- View form results in real-time;
- Capture and analyze feedback.
We often need input from great groups of co-workers or clients in today’s collaborative work environment.
With Microsoft Forms, you can build, design, and distribute surveys, quizzes, and surveys and view real-time results. Surveys can be created using themes or tailored to your brand and style.
Participants can respond from any web browser to any device. Surveys can be sophisticated, containing branching and built-in data analysis.
Forms are an incredible engagement tool because they have a focused interface that provides progress tracking and other analysis. That is why multiple businesses are already using it to increase their training and education practices.
Yet, there are many hidden features in Forms that you may not have known at first glance.
Planner
Planner lets you create project plans, organize and assign tasks to members, track progress using visual dashboards, and keep the whole team up to date. Planner integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft 365 applications, including Microsoft teams.
Microsoft Planner is available through a mobile application and over the Internet through your web browser.
Within Planner, you have access to a centralized Planner Center that summarizes your own tasks along with all the plans you have created. You can review projects that are part of Microsoft Teams. This will allow you to gain an insight into the progress of tasks or anything else that may need attention.
The Planner’s card-style interface, KanBan, will be familiar to Trello users, but the integration with the rest of the Office 365 package is where Planner proves its worth. If you possess an Office 365 business account, getting people from your company into a project is effortless.
Planner integrates into the Office 365 suite so you can use Teams to keep all conversations that are project-related and documents in one place, use Microsoft Power Automate to automate recurring project tasks, and quickly move information between Outlook or OneNote and Planner.
Conclusion
Suppose you use Microsoft 365 as your guiding suite in the business industry. In that case, you are aware that your data is of the utmost importance, and you need an additional backup for your Office 365 data since Microsoft is not offering a proper Office 365 backup.
Microsoft itself recommends its users to use a third-party solution for Office 365 backup allowing your business/company to keep up with the great work. Backing up Office 365 is crucial for the entire business world.