Microsoft Office 365: The Know It All Guide

Realistically speaking, every enterprise workforce revolves around the standard office productivity tools such as Word, Excel, emails, calendars, and PowerPoint. But ever since the workforce has been heavily dependent on mobile, these tools have had to reinvent. That is probably the only reason that Microsoft decided to upgrade to a platform that is more mobile collaborative and helps in getting more work done.

Microsoft Office suite has become the go to tool for almost every organisation, and it is the only suite that we measure the competitors against. So given that Microsoft is the leader in this section, it is essential that you know everything about Office. To help you become ‘Office’ savvy, we have compiled a list of important details and created a guide that you can refer to.

Office at a glance:

Office 365? A productivity suite application that is one of the most important source to get work done, which comes loaded with applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and OneNote.

Importance? As the benchmark for productivity suites, competing applications will always be weighed against Office products.

Relevance? Office 365 is the only productivity application that provides the latest tools for the mobile-centric workforce. This makes Office the most sort after tool for professionals.

Availability? Office 365, latest version, is currently available (inclusive of Office 2016 applications)

Buy? You can pick the version of Office 365 best suited for your Enterprise, Home, or School requirement, either by a yearly or monthly subscription.

Microsoft Office 365: What is it?

A subscription based service, Office 365 provides the users with complete range of productivity applications, crucial to get work done. This application is inclusive—but not limited—of Word, Emails, Calendars, Spreadsheets, and an application for presentation.

For instance, the Office 365 Business Premium subscription costs INR 660 (per user/per month), inclusive of the following applications:

Outlook: Microsoft’s solution for managing emails, contacts, and calendars. This is one of the applications that has been around for a while now, and comes with mixed reviews; users either hate it or love it.

Word: One of the most popular and user-friendly tool, which is available in both Premium and Business versions. This is the preferred tool for document creation.

Excel: The hero of data analysis ever since its birth, Excel is known for solving data woes. The flag bearer of the Office suite is available in both Premium and Business version.

PowerPoint: Presentations, right from college to work, we have been using presentations for communicating important information to a group of people. Be it a basic slide, video, or animation, you can use this tool for creating brilliant presentations.

OneNote: Capturing information while on the go has become essential. OneNote allows users to take notes on their devices and retrieve them from any other device. It’s a simple cloud productivity app.

Exchange: The Exchange server is known for handling email management duties. With Microsoft Exchange, every user gets 50 GB email storage.

OneDrive: The other important and fundament application for cloud storage. Every Microsoft user gets 1 TB storage in the OneDrive application.

SharePoint: SharePoint provides the business with tools that are helpful for infrastructure management at the backend.

Skype for Business: Given that we work from various geographical locations, video conferencing have become an important part to run business. The Skype for Business applications lets organisations host unlimited video and audio conferencing, with 250 people.

Microsoft Teams: The millennials are the driving force of the modern enterprise and are more at ease with chat applications. To meet the requirements of the millennials, Microsoft introduced Microsoft Teams, a workspace that is chat-based, that helps in integrating tools, applications, and people.

Microsoft Office 365: Why is it important?

When it comes to functioning in the modern enterprise, communication and connectivity is the most crucial aspect of the enterprise. With Microsoft Office 365, users have access to productivity tools that is important for collaboration, productivity, and communication.

The known fact, Office 365 is the idol against which the existing productivity applications are weighed. It is the ‘the standard’ for productivity software.

Microsoft Office 365: The Competition

Office has always had head-on collision with G Suite by Google—a collaboration and productivity app, earlier known as Google Apps. The G Suite comes with a set of applications, features, and tools, designed for enhancing the modern workforce collaboration (mobile users).

There are other tools in the market, at a cheaper price, but these tools often lack the necessary features required in the productivity tools.

Microsoft Office 365: Who does it matter?

Every day of the work begins with checking your emails, and without these applications, it is a distant dream. Beyond this, every once in a while, we use word documents, a significant amount of people are seen using the spreadsheet or presentation tool more than once in their professional life.

These are tools that help us get our work done. These are the tools responsible for our productivity. And this is why Office 365 plays a pivotal role.