If you’re searching for ways to boost productivity, then using Office 365 is a brilliant place to start. Even the basic version will help you be more productive and improve efficiency, but the real benefits come when you download additional apps for the platform. With these apps, you can take your business performance to a whole new level.
Microsoft Forms
One of the secrets to running a business that operates at peak profitability is understanding your target audience. Market research takes up a considerable portion of your time, more so than you’d care to admit. But, with Microsoft Forms, you have an app that streamlines feedback.
Essentially, this application allows you to draw up different surveys or polls, which you can then send to thousands of different recipients. It’s a useful tool to use as part of your email marketing strategy, making it quicker and easier to gain instant feedback. From here, you can use the data from these forms to decide on the next moves for your business.
Furthermore, it works well as an app to improve productivity in the workplace as well. Instead of people spending ages talking about the next work night out, you can send an email with a form that gets people to vote for the next date and destination. There’s less discussion and more working!
Microsoft Flow
This app is all about automating different tasks between various Microsoft services, like Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Word, and so on. The premise is that you create workflows across your different apps, so various services are connected. From here, you will automate a lot of the mundane and repetitive tasks.
To make things even better, there are loads of templates you can use to quickly set up flows and automate a lot of your daily tasks. This improves your productivity as you spend less time doing the same things over and over again.
Microsoft Teams
Communication is vital when you want to operate an effective business and improve efficiency. With Microsoft Teams, you basically have a chat-based app that’s designed for businesses. You can set up group chats with different people, keeping entire teams all in one place.
This means that your teams can talk to one another regardless of where they might be. If someone works from home or is out on a sales meeting, they can easily provide updates via the app. You can even share documents and files as well, or host group calls using Skype.
Mainly, this puts an end to all the time that’s wasted trying to get hold of your team members or get everyone all in one place for a meeting. Just communicate via the app, and everything is more productive.
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Microsoft To-Do
If you ask anyone for some basic tips on improving productivity and performance, they’ll all recommend task management. If you’re able to manage your daily tasks, then you’ll become more efficient. To-Do lets you do this, by creating a digital to-do list via Office 365.
The beauty of this app is that it allows you to list tasks, prioritise them, and even create separate lists for different things. For example, you could have a list of tasks for Work and one for Home. It sounds silly, but setting your work and personal life apart is such a simple way to improve your productivity. Instead of a long list including everything you need to do in your life, you have separate ones that keep both aspects running alongside each other.
Furthermore, Microsoft To-Do uses artificial intelligence to suggest which tasks are more important, and it automatically creates a new list every day.
Power BI
Power BI is one of the more complex apps, but it’s also an essential application for all businesses. Inside this app, you will see loads of different tools that let you get to grips with your business data. These tools can analyse everything and anything, providing you with reports that are easy to digest.
Consequently, you save hours by not having to trawl through and analyse your data manually. It’s all done via Power BI, so you get concrete evidence of what’s happening in your company. You can even view these reports on your mobile phone, meaning you can be even more productive!
The bottom line is that Office 365 contains so many apps that can help improve your day-to-day work performance. The best thing is, it’s entirely up to you how many of these apps you use. With Office 365, everything is scalable to suit your budget and your business requirements. If you’d like some help on how to get the most out of this platform, then we provide Office 365 training for professionals. It’s a one-day workshop, and you’ll learn everything you need for an affordable fee.
If you’d like to learn how to use these apps confidently, check out our Office 365 training London courses.