The Microsoft 365 Productivity Tools You Shouldn't Ignore

Every business needs to find ways to work more efficiently, collaborate well and boost productivity. It’s no surprise that Microsoft 365 is widely used by businesses globally with its numerous applications designed to improve workflows.

Subscription holders have access to all that Office 365 applications have to offer as well as a wealth of tools that integrate seamlessly across the Microsoft platform.

Would time-saving tools be useful for your team? If so, look no further. There are Microsoft productivity tools for everything you can imagine.

Here are some of our favourites:

Microsoft Planner

Now that many teams are working remotely most of the time, it can be a real challenge to manage multiple projects and workloads. Microsoft Planner is the key to simplifying this task.

With Planner, you can access a visual display of your team which allows you to categorise projects, analyse insights and even communicate with users and assign them tasks. It’s not just a tool for managers though – all users can create their own plans, share files and chat with other team members about progress.

Office Lens

This application is particularly useful for anyone who is on the go or needs help with organising documents.

Are your desk drawers overflowing with receipts and notes? Office Lens allows you to use your phone or tablet to take a photo of documents and store them online. This works wherever you are and can be accessed on any device.

As well as this, Office Lens makes these documents readable through OCR technology so that you can edit text from your scanned images. 

Microsoft Forms

Making group decisions is never easy. It can sometimes feel impossible to get a consensus when you have to individually chase people up. However, Microsoft Forms solves this problem for you. It allows you to ask questions, create polls and distribute surveys to up to 5,000 people.

Using one application to store all the information you need is much simpler than 5,000 emails or texts containing 5,000 different answers. The bonus is that it will integrate smoothly with other Office 365 applications, such as Excel, so that you can manage your data easily.

Power Automate (previously known as Microsoft Flow)

This tool will help you to save valuable time by streamlining workflows across applications. Power Automate will automatically share data from one platform to another to cut down on repetitive manual tasks.

Power Automate can automate everything from reports to scheduled emails and storing certain data in the cloud. These automated processes will minimise mundane tasks and could save users hours every month.

Microsoft MyAnalytics

Are you convinced that you’re spending too much of your day in meetings, and not enough time delivering on projects? Well, you could be right about that – and now you can know for sure.

MyAnalytics enables users to track and analyse work time. This isn’t simply a time tracking tool though… it allows you to see which projects you spend the most time on, who you work with for the longest, how many meetings you have and how much time you spend on email, after hours or in focus hours.

Analysing your time in this way will quickly shed light on any areas that need managing or adjusting so that you can be more productive.

These tools are just a few of the many Microsoft productivity applications available. There are Azure-specific tools, integrated Office 365 features and numerous useful add-ins widely available across Microsoft applications.

Optimising Microsoft 365 effectively could save your business time – and saved time is saved money.

To start making the most of your Microsoft 365 subscription today, talk to one of our friendly experts.

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