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12 Office Hacks to have a Productive Day

To excel in a professional career, there are a lot of other things other than expertise. For a quick roundup, have a short glimpse of your typical day at the office. Does your workspace look organized? Do you meet all of the given deadlines? What things become the hurdle in your daily office routine?

While you answer these questions, you start to see that you are messing up with your day in the office. Since it is hard to generalize the things which are essential to make the most out of your day in the office. So, we have got some important and main things covered. As MS Office is the most widely used platform in the offices. Hence, just fixing your Office usage with the peculiar hacks would improve a lot of things. In a nutshell, the below 12 Office 365 hacks would surely get you ace through your typical day and thus make you more productive.

1.Bookmark Function in Teams

It might have happened a lot that you scroll a whole chat just to find one specific message from it. But this hassle can very well be addressed with the bookmark function that enables you to flag important messages from the chats and also save different items from any post. To do that, go near that message and click “Flag”. This way, you are able to see your bookmarked posts and chats in the flagged items.

2.Synchronization

Synchronization is another important tip that is inevitable for productivity enhancement. There may come a situation, like remote working, where different time members would be working on one project. Without synchronization, there won’t be any coherence and everyone will be doing their respective tasks in a rather individual fashion. In these situations, it might happen that individual tasks may not well connect when compiled together. This can be addressed with SharePoint and Office 365, where multiple individuals are capable to work on the same file/document at the same time, while the software continuously synchronizes the changes automatically.

3.Digitalization of Important Documents

The digitalization of important documents such as manuals, corporate statements, style guides, and many other documents can prove very fruitful. It does not only save the printing cost but also allows managers to share such stuff with their employees in SharePoint or Teams in a rather swift and easy way. Moreover, such digital content also saves time as it is easy to skim through the document and make editing easy whenever required.

4.OneDrive for Business

OneDrive for business is a great utility for remote working and collaborative work. Files uploaded on this app get stored in the cloud which allows contributors to access the file from anywhere in the world. For those, who have access to either no or poor internet, there is another associated app called Sync App where the user just needs to log into Office 365, access OneDrive, and select the library which must be accessed offline. Sync App allows users to sync around 20,000 folders and files.

5.Transcribe Meetings via Teams

Teams is not just too good for carrying meetings, but the possibility to record the meetings and transcribe them later via a built-in feature is a great time-saving hack. In addition, you can even transcribe your old recorded meetings. To do that, go to the recording, click “Edit”, select “English” in the Video Language section, and then click “Auto-generate a Caption File”. Once done, click “Apply”.

6.Documents on OneDrive

It is a great hack to keep all documents and email attachments on the OneDrive. This hack is useful for both productivity enhancement and time-saving. By uploading files on OneDrive, sharing also becomes easy, as the user just needs to grant access to specific people and devices. As far as email attachments are concerned, just click on save all to OneDrive and everything will automatically be uploaded to the OneDrive folder. Furthermore, for local files to be uploaded on OneDrive, just drag and drop concerning files and folders into the OneDrive folder.

7.Set up Time for Reviewing Emails

Outlook is the prime email utility in today’s corporate world. Reviewing emails could turn into quite a hectic activity if someone receives hundreds of them. Moreover, not every email is worth giving attention to. On the contrary, some people do not check their email regularly. For both of them, it is recommended to block some time on your Outlook Calendar to review emails and never miss the important ones.

8.Communication via Teams

As Teams is very well integrated with Office 365, so it is suggested to shift all communications to Teams. You can easily post or forward emails directly to Teams for the whole group. Just choose the channel to which the message needs to be communicated. After this, click the ellipsis icon to fetch the email address, then copy-paste it to the email, and eventually it will pop up in Teams. This presents a much effective way to email all the stuff together instead of doing it separately for each one of them.

9.Temporarily Turn Off Notifications

While it is beneficial to get notification of important emails or messages but this benefit can turn into a distraction if such events occur during some important task or assignment. To mitigate this challenge, you can turn email popups and other notifications off in the lower right corner.

10.SharePoint Countdown Timer

Another great Office 365 hack is to add the countdown timer to the web interface of SharePoint. In this way, teams can stay focused that they need to adhere to the given deadline. Moreover, the whole department or company can also stay in the loop ahead of an important event such as a product launch. To set up a countdown, go to the corresponding page, click “Edit”, then click the “plus” icon, and then click the “Countdown Timer” icon.

11.Recurring Meetings

It is often seen that the meeting dates, rooms, or schedules get changed. So, instead of overcrowding calendars, using the recurring meetings function via your Outlook Calendar helps to address the situation professionally. This way, if you want to modify a scheduled meeting, then cancel it and send the new meeting date and time separately.

12.Data Visualization

It might be cumbersome for many professionals to read and learn the data, especially when subject data is quite big. This lag can be dealt with the efficient use of Excel. Excel offers various infographics, making it easier for the audience to grasp the concept of concerned data. Therefore, always try to visualize your data to make it more user-friendly and readable.

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