Office 365 For Dummies

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How to Use Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is available to users who have licenses with following Office 365 corporate subscriptions: E1, E3, E5, Business Premium, and Business Essentials. In the education plans, it is available in the A1, A1 Plus, A5, and A3 subscriptions. Plans are in place to roll out Teams in the government cloud as well. Teams can be accessed from the web browser, a desktop application, or a mobile app. The maximum number of users who can access the full functionality of Teams is based on the number of licensed users in the organization. Guest access is allowed, which means that users from other Office 365 tenants can be invited to an organization’s Teams hub without the need for additional licenses. With Teams, you can conduct one-on-one or group audio and video calls. You can share screens during web conferencing, schedule meetings, and also record those meetings. In addition, each user has up to 1 TB of storage space. From an administrator’s standpoint, Teams offers tools for managing users and third-party applications. There are reports to glean usage and settings that can be configured with policies specific to the organization. For peace of mind, Microsoft offers a 99.9 percent financially backed service-level agreement (SLA) uptime for Teams.

Touring the Microsoft Teams user interface

Tabs, bots, @mentions, and red bangs are just part of the new lingo you’re going to need to add to your vocabulary to use Teams. That’s assuming you’re already a savvy social media user who knows what emojis, stickers, and giphys are all about. Let’s take a tour of the Teams user interface. When you run the desktop application, the first screen you see after you log in is shown below.

• App bar: Here you can navigate to the various sections in Teams. From the top, you’ll see the following icons:
  • Activity is where you’ll find mentions, replies, and other notifications.
  • Chat is where you’ll see your recent one-on-one or group chats and your Contacts list.
  • Teams displays all the teams you are a member of.
  • Meetings or Calendar is synched with your Outlook calendar and displays all your upcoming meetings.
  • Files aggregates all the files from all the teams you are a member of. It is also where you access your personal OneDrive for Business storage.
  • Calls allows you to see a history of all incoming and outgoing video and audio calls. You can also call others in your organization, simply by typing their name.
  • […] includes links to apps that are tied to Teams and the channels within Teams.
  • Store takes you to apps and services that can be integrated into Teams.
  • Feedback takes you to the Microsoft Teams user voice page where you can leave feedback about the service.
• Teams section: In the image above, the Teams icon is selected in the App bar, so the list of one's teams is displayed.
• Channel: A dedicated section within a team to organize conversations and tasks into specific topics or projects.
• Join or Create a Team button: Clicking this button takes you through the process of creating or joining a team. This button is only visible when the Teams icon is selected in the App bar.
• New Chat button: Clicking this button selects the Chat icon in the App bar and allows you to start a new chat with an individual or a group.
• Command bar: This bar at the top is used to query apps or perform a search in Teams.
• Tabs: Switch between different Teams pages with these tabs. Conversations and Files are automatically included; the + sign tab allows you to add shortcuts to content in Teams.
• Channel Conversations: This section displays all the conversations in the selected channel. Chats in Channel Conversations are persistent, so if you’ve been away, it’s easy to scroll through to get caught up when you get back. Chats can include visual indicators such as the @mention, which indicates that the chat specifically mentions a user, or a red bang to indicate high importance. Take note that chats are open by design so everyone in the team has visibility to the conversation to help speed up the decision-making process when needed.
• Compose box: This is where you can type a message to start a conversation. You can send a quick chat or expand the Compose box to access rich formatting tools.
• Send icon: When you’re ready to share your chat, click the Send icon to post your chat to the team.

Getting help from the Microsoft Teams Command bar

Teams is intuitive to use, but you if you need quick assistance, the Command bar is your one-stop destination for help. You can do a search across conversations, users, files, and apps. For example, if you enter the word “launch” in the command bar, the left pane will display the search results grouped by Messages, People, and Files. You can also run a command right from the Command bar by entering a slash ( / ). This action will display the available commands or shortcuts. Select the appropriate command from the list to initiate the command.

Collaborating in the Microsoft Teams Hub

Many think that the “email tree” phenomenon was isolated to big enterprise environments, but it often rears its ugly head in small organizations, too. Imagine the following scenario: Someone sends an email to three people asking for their input on something. Two of the recipients immediately respond. Recipient #3 replies to Recipient #2 but forgets to reply to all. Now Recipient #2 has information the others don’t have. Recipient #1 then forwards the email to yet another person (Recipient #4) who replies to all with his feedback, which doesn’t account for what’s already been discussed prior to him being involved. Pretty soon, everyone’s mailbox explodes with replies to replies and replies to all so that the sender finally throws her hands up in frustration because now the conversation has gotten out of hand and she's spending too much time getting everyone up to speed. On top of that, she now must consolidate all the feedback manually. Teams makes email trees go away. In Teams, the sender can avoid the previous scenario by uploading the file into the Teams channel, @mention the people she needs feedback from, and start a conversation right from the document in Teams. This way, everyone sees everyone’s comments and edits. A new person joining the conversation can just scroll up to get up to speed and everyone is well-informed and happy.

Creating and managing a Microsoft Teams hub

To collaborate in Teams, you first need to be either a member of a Teams hub or the creator of one. To create a team:

1. Click Teams from the App bar.
2. Click the Join or Create a Team link that appears at the bottom of the App bar.
3. Click the Create a Team card.
4. Enter the name and description of the team.
5. Choose the privacy settings for your team (Private or Public). A Private team means only team owners can add members, while a Public team means anyone in your organization can join the Team.
6. Click Next.
7. Add members to your team by adding a name, email address, a distribution list, or a mail-enabled security group in the Add box. A team can have a maximum of 2,500 members from either your organization or external users through secure guest access.
8. Optionally, you can choose the role of the team member (Owner or Member) by clicking the drop-down arrow next to Member. If you forget to do this, you can update the membership type later.
9. Click Close. Team management features are accessed by clicking the ellipses next to your team name in the App bar. The following management options are available:
   • Manage team launches the Members tab where you can add or remove members, change the role of a member, or search for a member.
   • Add a channel launches a dialog box where you can enter a channel name and the description for the channel.
   • Add members launches a dialog box where you can enter the names of people, distribution lists, or mail-enabled security groups to add to your team.
   • Leave the team launches a validation window that asks you to confirm your intent to leave the team.
   • Edit team launches a dialog box where you can change the team name, the team description, and privacy settings.
   • Get link to team launches a dialog box where you can copy the URL for the team to share with others.
   • Delete the team launches a validation window that asks you to confirm your intent to delete the team.

Chatting in Microsoft Teams

When a new member is added to a team, that member automatically gets access to all previous conversations, files, and other types of information shared in the team’s hub. This is especially helpful for onboarding a new team member to a project. There is no need to think about what files to forward to get the new member up to speed, since they can self-serve from the content available in the hub or simply ask for help from others through chat. To start a chat, click on the Compose Box and start typing your message while in either the Activity, Chat, or Teams sections. When you’re done, click the Send icon to post your message. Depending on the culture of your team, you can spice up your chats with emojis, giphys, or stickers. You’ll find a variety of options when you click these icons below the Compose Box.

Sometimes conversations in a team can become noisy when there are many members talking about different topics. To help with that, take advantage of the threaded messages feature in Teams by replying directly to a specific message so the reply in in context with the original message.

Sharing files in Microsoft Teams

When you create a Teams hub, a SharePoint site is automatically created in the backend, which, in turn, creates a document library for each channel. Files uploaded in a Teams channel show up in the Files tab and are stored in a SharePoint document library. In fact, you can click the ellipses next to the file name and then choose to open the file from its location in SharePoint. To share a file in Teams:

1. Select Teams from the App bar.
2. Compose a message in the Compose box from a channel.
3. Click the Attach icon (it looks like a paperclip) below the Compose box and select the source for the attachment you want to share.
4. Select the file from the source and upload it. The file you uploaded will now be embedded in the message.
5. Click the Send icon (it looks like an airplane) to post your message. The file you shared will also show up in the Files tab. Alternatively, you can go directly to the Files tab and click the Upload button to upload a file. Once the file is uploaded, click the name of the file to open it. Once opened, you can start a conversation with others regarding the document.

Meeting and conferencing the Microsoft Teams way

Chats and conversations in Teams are fun ways to communicate with others. Sometimes, however, it’s more efficient to get on a quick call with team members to resolve an issue versus going back and forth in a chat. Fortunately, Teams provides a complete meeting solution with support for audio and video conferencing. Because calling capabilities are built into Teams, you don’t need to log out of Teams and open a separate application to start an ad-hoc meeting. For more formal meetings, you can schedule a meeting much like how you set up meetings in Outlook. Meetings you create in Teams will show up in your Outlook calendar.

Setting up an impromptu Microsoft Teams meeting

Let’s say for example you are chatting with three members of your team about an issue. After a lengthy back and forth and waiting times in between, you decide it’ll be much faster to just get on a call and talk about the issue. To start an impromptu meeting:

1. Reply to the conversation thread and click the Video icon that appears at the bottom of the Compose box.
2. From the video window that pops up, enter a subject for your call.
3. Toggle the video camera on or off to choose between sharing your video or just audio.
4. Click Meet Now to start the conference. A conference window will open with a pane on the right where you can invite others to join the meeting.
5. When you’re done with the meeting, click the red phone icon to end the call and leave the meeting.

After the meeting, notes and conversations are posted to the channel so others who couldn’t make it to the meeting can quickly catch up on what they’ve missed.

Scheduling a Microsoft Teams meeting

You can set up a formal meeting ahead of time to give the invited participants notice about a meeting. Like Outlook, formal meeting requests in Teams include a Meeting Title (the equivalent of Subject in Outlook), Location, Start and End Date or Time, Details, and a list of participants. In Teams, you can select a channel to meet in. When a channel is selected, artifacts from the meeting are posted in the channel. To schedule a Teams meeting:

1. Click Meetings from the Apps bar.
2. Click the Schedule a Meeting button that appears at the bottom of the left pane.
3. From the New meeting window, enter the Title, Location, Start and End Date/Time, Details, Channel, and the names of the people you want to invite to the meeting.
4. If you want to check people’s availability, click Schedule Assistant above the Details section to display your participants’ availability based on their Outlook calendars.
5. Click the Schedule a Meeting button. The meeting is now scheduled and will appear in the Meetings section in Teams as well as in your Outlook calendar.

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Office 365: Building Reports with Power BI

Power BI (BI is short for Business Intelligence) is a service-based product that lives in the Microsoft cloud. It is part of what Microsoft calls its “Power Platform,” which also includes Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. Microsoft Flow is a next generation workflow tool. (If you have used SharePoint Designer to build workflows in the past, then you will want to take a look at Microsoft Flow to build your next generation workflows.) PowerApps is a product for building apps for mobile devices — think iPhone and Android. Power BI is the data component of this group of products. All of these products work closely with other Office 365 products and are included in Office 365 depending on the subscription you have. Think of Power BI as a website that lets you connect hundreds of data sources to it so you can build reports and integrate those reports in other products (like Office 365).

Power BI for Office 365 and Power BI are two separate products. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately. It even starts with a free trial.

To access Power BI, go to your Office 365 tenant and select it from the app menu on the left side of your screen.

Pulling data into Power BI

When you first open Power BI you are prompted to add data. You can get data from a number of sources, but the easiest and quickest way to add data to Power BI is to pull data from the apps and services your organization already uses. For example, you can connect to everything from Google Analytics to GitHub to MailChimp and ZenDesk. And of course you can connect to other Office 365 apps as well! To pull data into Power BI to analyze, click the Get button under Services from the initial landing page. You will then be presented with options for the services from which you can pull data. In this case, let’s pull in some data from a local Excel file. Power BI uses a concept called Workspaces to keep things organized. By default, you have a workspace that is just for you. You can create organizational workspaces, but you will need something beyond the free plan to do so. To pull Excel data into Power BI:

1. Navigate to the Power BI website. You can find Power BI on the apps menu in Office 365 or you can navigate to it directly at app.powerbi.com.
2. On the welcome screen, click the Get button in the Files box under the Create New Content section. You can also get to this welcome screen by clicking on the Workspaces tab on the left and selecting your personal workspace.
3. Choose the location of the Excel file you want to import. If it is on your local computer, choose Local File. If it is in your OneDrive or SharePoint site, select those options. This example uses the Financial Sample data Microsoft provides.
4. Choose whether you want to connect Power BI to your Excel file or import the entire Excel file into Power BI. You are now ready to build reports and share them with others.

Creating reports in Power BI

Once you have data connected to Power BI, you are ready to create a report. A report consists of elements such as bar charts and graphs. To begin creating a report:

1. Click the Reports tab in your Workspace and then click the Create button in the upper-right corner.
2. Choose the dataset you just imported and click Create. In this case it is the Financial Sample from Microsoft. The report builder page appears and you can build your report by adding visuals such as charts, graphs, and filters. The report builder page can be overwhelming at first, but as you play around with it you will find it is rather like Excel.
3. Click the line chart to add the control to the report and then select the data for Month Name and Sales.
4. Click the Save button on the upper-right corner of the report builder and give the report a name.
5. Click on your Workspace again and select the Reports tab to see your shiny new report. You can view the report in your browser by clicking on it.

Displaying reports in Office 365

You can always display your reports in a Workspace that others can navigate to through the Power BI interface. In our case, let’s embed our report in a SharePoint site so that it becomes part of the intranet portal. To add a Power BI report to a SharePoint page, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the SharePoint page where you want to add the report.
2. Click the plus icon and select Power BI.
3. On the Power BI control that appears, click the Add Report button.
4. Paste in the URL of the report and press Enter. This is the address from the web browser when you viewed the report earlier in the previous steps. The report is embeded in the page.
5. Click the Publish button to publish your page to the SharePoint site.

Adding reports has finally become straightforward, but this is just scratching the surface of what is possible. You can pull data from all types of services and build reports from them. You can then embed those reports in SharePoint or other apps so that people viewing them see real-time data. When you are ready to take the next step, you can jump into PowerApps and Microsoft Flow for building mobile apps and creating workflows.

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Working Efficiently with Office 365 Online

Office Online is great for everyday work, especially for millennials who are accustomed to using a variety of Internet-connected devices running on different platforms. It runs on all major operating systems and web browsers. If you’re a company that wants to foster a culture of collaboration and cooperation (who doesn’t?), then Office Online is a great solution to add to your toolkit.

You can also save on licensing costs with Office Online. If you have workers out in the field or assigned at retail stores who don’t need the full-fledged version of Office, you can assign them a cheaper license for access to just Office Online such as Office 365 Business Essentials or Office 365 E1. You can even save money on company-issued devices by allowing your employees to use their own devices to run Office Online.

Security features in the Office desktop applications such as SafeLinks are also available in Office Online. SafeLinks is a feature that proactively protects users when they click on malicious hyperlinks inside an Office document.

Boosting team collaboration with Office 365, intelligently

You always start at Office.com access Office Online. From there you can run any of the online apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. Core authoring features in Word include table of contents, spell check, grammar check, picture editing (rotate, crop, drag and drop), numbered lists, bullet lists, and more. You can even have smileys as your bullets! In Excel, conditional formatting, pivot tables, shapes, freeze panes, clear formatting, cross-sheet copy/paste, find and replace, and improved printing are supported. Creating professional presentations no longer requires the desktop version of PowerPoint. The online version supports copying and pasting slides across presentations, image effects, format painter, the ability to select multiple slides and add charts from Excel, contextual spelling, animation markers, animated GIFs, improved tables, and more. Office Online has also gotten smart. Unlike the previous version, your documents in Office Online now open in Editing Mode so you can immediately start working on the document. And the Share dialog box in Office Online works the same way as the desktop version. Intelligent services delivered through artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have always been available in Office Online. These services save time and make us not just seem smart but actually become smarter. For example, spell check is something available and commonly used in Word. And Microsoft’s addition of grammar checking was a great boon for non-native English speakers. Recently, Microsoft added writing assistance so not only does the intelligence service check for spelling (indicated by a red squiggle) and grammar (shown with a blue double underline), it also checks for clarity and conciseness (shown with a dotted underline).

Keeping malicious actors at bay in Office 365

Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a security feature in Office 365 E5 or A5 plans. If you have other plans, Office 365 ATP can be purchased as an add-on. Office 365 includes ATP Safe Attachments and ATP Safe Links to help protect your organization from malicious actors. ATP Safe Attachments ensures that email attachments are safe, whereas ATP Safe Links makes sure links to websites in email messages or embedded in Office documents do not result in a breach. In Outlook Online, you may receive an email from someone who is trying to harvest your credentials through an infected attachment. With ATP Safe Attachments, that attachment is detonated in a virtual machine before it reaches your mailbox. If it’s a safe attachment, then you will see it in your email. If not, the attachment will be removed automatically from the email with a notification to inform you that a malicious attachment has been removed. This all happens very quickly, within minutes and even seconds, so it doesn’t impact your productivity. If Microsoft needs more time to analyze the attachment, your email will still be delivered immediately with a notification that the attachment is still being analyzed. ATP Safe Links, on the other hand, protects you by checking web addresses (URLs) in real-time every time you click on a link in your email or in an Office document. Verifying the web address at the time of click is important because hackers can redirect a once-safe URL to a bad URL. Just as ATP Safe Attachments detonates attachments, ATP Safe Links detonates URLs in a virtual machine when you click on them to determine whether or not the destination is safe. If it is, then you are taken directly to the website. If it’s not safe, you will be blocked and presented with a notification.

Don’t confuse Office 365 ATP with Windows Defender ATP, which is a separate set of security features in Windows 10. Using the power of AI, machine learning, and behavior analytics, Windows Defender ATP helps prevent, detect, and respond to attacks. If used together with Office 365 ATP, your organization will gain a much more enhanced security posture.

Experiencing Office Online

Since it first debuted in Office 2007, the ribbon interface has gone through several updates. In June 2018, Microsoft rolled out yet another update designed to adapt to the needs of users who need to collaborate in today’s cloud computing environment. These updates include:

• A simplified ribbon that displays one row of buttons instead of multiple rows. Features and commands you use most are readily available while giving more real estate on your screen for content. If, however, you prefer the previous version, a toggle is available to revert to the classic ribbon interface.

• New colors and icons designed to scale based on the size of the screen so they stay crisp and clear across different types of devices.
• Search powered by AI and machine learning, which displays recommendations as soon as you click the search box.

These updates are being rolled out in stages starting with Word Online. If you don’t see these updates in your Office 365 environment, don’t worry; they will eventually be rolled out to all Office 365 tenants.

Office Online as a cloud service is a browser-based productivity solution that includes the core Office apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. It’s a free service, but it requires a cloud storage account for storing documents such as OneDrive (consumer version), OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online.

Getting the most out of Office Online

The advantage of software as a service (SaaS), such as Office 365, is that SaaS vendors can roll out enhancements and updates in shorter cycles and require minimal actions from the end user. If you visit the Office 365 Roadmap page, you’ll notice a number of features and updates in development to the service. When Microsoft launches these items, they may just show up in the service or application without the user installing anything. So, don’t be surprised if you’re using Office Online one day and come back the next day to find new features to help you get the job done. Here are some tips to get the most out of Office Online:

• Use SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business as your online storage solution versus a third-party solution. The deep integration between Office Online and other Office 365 services can save you a lot of time by avoiding integration issues. Additionally, built-in AI and machine learning in Office 365 will capture computing behaviors in your environment to drive better security and collaboration.
• Install the free Office apps on your mobile devices so you can access files on to go. When you open a document in your mobile app, you will automatically be taken to the last spot you were working on so you can easily pick up where you left off.
• Sync your OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online document libraries to your hard drive. This way you can access documents when you’re offline using your Office desktop applications. Any changes you make while you’re offline will automatically be saved and synced when you’re back online.

Getting your voice heard

Microsoft is eager to get your feedback on Office Online and other services. If you would like to help improve Office, there are many ways to make your voice heard. In Office Online, at the bottom right of the screen, you will see a link that says GIVE FEEDBACK TO MICROSOFT. Clicking on that link will open a quick feedback form, which you can then submit. If you want to actively engage with other users who are providing feedback to Microsoft, you can also visit the following forums:

• Word Online UserVoice
• Excel Online UserVoice
• PowerPoint Online UserVoice
• OneNote UserVoice