Office 365 Applications

Available products:

The programs listed below are available in both Microsoft Office ProPlus and Microsoft Office Online. Office ProPlus is the suite of Microsoft Office products that are installed on your computer. With Office Online, you can create and edit your files using web-browser based versions of the same products.

Excel

Excel offers the ability to organize and manipulate data in spreadsheets with sorting, calculations, graphing tools, pivot tables, and macros.

Training and Additional Information for Excel

Common Use Cases

  • Collate and analyze data

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

New Features

OneDrive

OneDrive for Business gives you one place to store, share, and sync your work or school files.

As part of the University of Chicago’s Office 365 service offering, you can save your files in OneDrive and then work with them from almost any device.

  • Upload files from your PC, Mac or Mobile device.
  • Share files with others.
  • Give others permission to edit files and work on them at the same time.
  • Get to your files from anywhere, on your computer, tablet, or phone.
  • Sync OneDrive for Business to your PC or Mac, so you can access your files even when you’re offline.
Training and Additional Information for OneDrive

Common Use Cases

  • Cloud storage for documents
  • Easy sharing of documents – share within the University or with others not at the University.

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

New Features (Microsoft OneDrive blog)

OneNote

OneNote provides a place to host notes, drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries and the ability to collaborate with others on these files.

Training and Additional Information for OneNote

Common Use Cases:

  • Share notebooks with common information with your department
  • Use OneNote as an OCR tool
  • Clip interesting items from the web
  • Post audio or handwritten notes
  • Use page templates to create agendas and take minutes for meetings
  • Create notebooks for your classes and keep your class notes organized
  • See how you can use the Class Notebook for education.

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks (Office support site)

Other resources

Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is an application used in conjunction with Exchange Online, the hosted email service from Microsoft, to provide email and calendaring functionality to faculty, students, and staff. Outlook enables University of Chicago users to securely access email messages through the desktop app, mobile app, and web browser.

Training and Additional Information for Outlook

Common Use Cases

  • Use Outlook to manage personal email, calendars, tasks, and contact lists across mobile, web, and desktop/laptop devices
  • Use Outlook to manage shared email and calendars, such as those that get created by Office 365 Groups/Teams.
  • Use Outlook to collate RSS feeds

Training and More Information

UChicago Knowledge Base

Tips and Tricks (Microsoft support site)

  • Follow an Office 365 Group shared mailbox to get updates to your personal mailbox.

New Features

PowerPoint

With PowerPoint, you can create presentations with images, videos, animation, and formatted text with templates or custom slide themes.

Training and Additional Information for PowerPoint

Common Use Cases:

  • Create presentations that stand out: use animation, cinematic motion, 3-d models
  • Create classroom presentations, with notes visible only to the presenter while presenting, yet available for later printing

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks (Microsoft Support site)

New Features

 

Word

Word is a word processing application in which you can format text, insert images and tables, and layout documents.

Training and Additional Information for Word

Common Use Cases

  • Word processing across any device

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks (Office support site)

Teams

Teams is a user-driven chat-based collaborative tool that provides a customizable team work space. As Teams is built on Office 365 Groups, whenever you create a team, it automatically comes with several additional Office 365 shared features: email, calendar, notebook with OneNote, file storage with OneDrive, Planner, SharePoint site and allows for chat and audio/video conferencing among team members.

 

Training and Additional Information for Teams

About

  • Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork in Office 365: a chat-based work space to collaborate in real time.  Access via the web, desktop client or mobile client.

Common Use Cases

  • Collaboration and chatting between members of a department
  • Create a work space for members of a project team
  • Inter-institutional collaboration
  • Student organization collaboration
  • Student to student knowledge sharing in classes
  • Classroom chat – augment Canvas by setting up a Team for a class.
  • Research and lab collaboration
  • See more common educational use cases

Quick Start Guide

  • Teams is a full-collaboration tool — anyone you add to the team will have full access across all of the assets that the Team owns (chats, files, plans, notebooks for example) so please consider who you wish to be a member of your team.
    • General Guideline: Use Teams when you want full access collaboration with under 2500 people
  • Consider using a team for your department and division, and then use channels within the team for specific topics.  Each of those channels will have its own chats, files, and notebooks organized for it, with everyone in the team able to access.
  • Naming Guide: Make your team name unique, and yet identifiable as to which dept or division it may belong to.  Example: BSD-HR.
  • Before adding a team:
    • Look to see if there is an established Team that may fit the need.
    • Decide if the Team should be public (searchable by members of the University) or private (not searchable)
    • Ensure there will be a purpose for the Team and that it will be of use.
  • Please add at least two owners for your team.
  • Try Teams before creating a new team, use the Demo Site that Microsoft makes available.
  • Extend Teams with tabs, applications, and connectors to talk to other cloud-based services and web pages.
  • Faculty: quick video training is available to showcase how Teams may be used in the classroom.

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks (Microsoft support site)

New Features and Teams Blog

Other resources

Bookings

Bookings is an online and mobile application that allows people to book appointments on your Office 365 calendar.

 

Training and Additional Information for Bookings

About

  • Bookings offers a Web front-end/mobile app capability for campus to book private appointments on an Office 365 calendar.

Common Use Cases

  • Book office hours for a group of teaching assistants for a class
  • Book office hours for staff of a campus center, project, or group.

Quick Start Guide

  • Go to portal.office.com, click the Bookings icon to set up a new Office 365 calendar to hold your bookings.
  • Setup your office hours when you are available
  • Define your services
  • Add available staff
  • Set working hours
  • Publish your calendar, and share the Bookings URL

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

  • Put your Bookings URL through a URL shortener (like bit.ly) to make an easier to real URL.
  • Use a good naming convention for the name of the page, do not name it the same as an individual. The page will be, by default, available in the global address list, and this could cause confusion.  Make the name be unique.
    • For instance, prepend the name of the office – example: IT Services – Collaboration Tools
  • Add Buffer time if you need to allow for transit time between appointments, or if you would like a breather before the next appointment.
  • Set up more than one service to allow for appointment times of varying lengths
  • Change the theme of your booking page to personalize it
  • If you are holding your appointments in a shared resource location (say, a meeting room on campus), then create meetings with those resources in your Outlook before publishing your Bookings page.  Bookings will not book meeting rooms for you; those have to be done in Outlook.
  • Customize the notifications for your services
  • See Bookings in action — book an IT Services collaboration expert with Bookings

Delve

Use Delve to manage your Office 365 profile, and to discover and organize the information across Office 365. Delve never changes any permissions, so you’ll only see documents that you already have access to. Other people will not see your private documents.

Training and Additional Information for Delve

About

  • Use Delve to find documents that you might be interested in, among those file repositories (including your own email in Office 365) to which you have access.

Training and More Information

Support

Tips and Tricks

See the screenshots below to show you information about the files that are shared with you.  You can see who owns the file, what type of file it is, what file share or repository the file came from, or if the file was from your email.  Save files you are interested in for quick access later.

 

 

  1. This has the name of the person to which the file belongs, and the last modification date of the file.
  2. Shows the type of file.
  3. Shows the name of the file.
  4. Shows where the file came from/what repository to which the file belongs.  In this case, the file was posted to a Microsoft Team.
  5. The icon on the left is the “save” icon.  Click the save icon to remember this file for easy access later.  The icon on the right shows that there are a group of people who have access to this file.
  6. Click the ellipsis “…” to get to more information.
  7. This icon shows that this file is an attachment from your email.
  8. This icon shows that there is a hyperlink here.

Flow

Microsoft Flow is a service for automating workflows across a growing number of cloud applications without coding.

Training and Additional Information for Flow

About

  • Use Flow to create automated workflows between applications and cloud services
  • Start from a template or create a workflow from scratch
  • Visual builder for workflow development

Common Use Cases

  • Create approval workflows
  • Notify your Team when other activity occurs
  • Save your email attachments to OneDrive
  • Many, many more.  Look at the templates for some ideas.

Training and More Information

New Features (Microsoft blog site, filtered for product updates)

Tips and Tricks

Support

Forms

Microsoft Forms allows your users to quickly and easily create custom quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registrations and more. When you create a quiz or form, you can invite others to respond to it using any web browser, even on mobile devices. As results are submitted, you can use built-in analytics to evaluate responses. Form data, such as quiz results, can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis or grading.

 

Training and Additional Information for Forms

Common Use Cases

  • Surveys
  • Quizzes
  • Polls
  • Feedback from Teams

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks (Microsoft support site)

Planner

Planner makes it easy to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat, and receive updates on projects. The ability to organize teamwork and collaborate on projects in a simple, visual way. Planner also has a chat feature to connect with other team members.

 

Training and Additional Information for Planner

About

  • Planner is a lightweight project management tool to visually assign and organize tasks for your team.

Common Use Cases

  • Manage work for a department
  • Manage small projects
  • Plan for events

Quick Start Guide

  • Set up the Buckets to match the workflow of your project.
    • Example bucket structures
      • Backlog, Sprint 1, Sprint 2
      • To-Do, Jan, Feb
      • To-Do, Phase I, Phase 2
  • Rename the labels to something that makes sense for your team.
  • Drag and drop tasks between bucket columns as needed.

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

  • Use the checklist items to cover subtasks, and make them visible on the card for quick updates.
  • If you don’t use checklist items, then add the description to the card — help clarify for the team what the task is about.
  • Use the views – calendar view in particular can make planning much easier.
  • Add backing documentation to the task itself.
  • Use the labels to denote metadata (importance, urgency, etc.)
  • Use the plan that was created with your Team.  Click the plus in a Team Channel to add a Planner
  • Your plans are fully accessible to all team members, anyone can interact with any task, not just those they are assigned to.
  • Planner cannot track dependencies between tasks.  Try creating buckets to show dependency lines, or order the cards within a bucket to reflect the dependency track.

PowerApps

PowerApps is a service for building and using custom business apps that connect to your data and work across the web and mobile – without the time and expense of custom software development.

 

Training and Additional Information for PowerApps

About

  • Build apps fast with a point-and-click approach to app design.
  • Choose from a large selection of templates or start from scratch.
  • Easily connect your app to data and use Excel-like expressions to easily add logic.
  • Publish your app to the web, iOS, Android, and Windows 10.

Common Use Cases

  • Create custom apps when the other Office 365 tools aren’t quite enough for what you need.
  • Use when you do not need custom branded applications.
  • Create mobile apps quickly (note: you will need PowerApps for mobile to see the applications.)

Training and More Information

Support

SharePoint

SharePoint allows you to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications. It provides the ability to quickly find information and seamlessly collaborate with others. SharePoint allows you to build intranet sites and create pages, document libraries, and create lists. Manage your daily routine with workflows, forms, and lists.

 

Training and Additional Information for SharePoint

About

  • SharePoint is a collaboration intranet system which allows for sharing and managing of content, knowledge, and applications.
  • SharePoint technology underlies OneDrive and Teams
  • SharePoint sites are automatically created whenever you create a new Office 365 group (such as those that are created when you create a Team.)

Common Use Cases

  • Use the SharePoint interface when you wish to set custom permissions on shared OneDrive folders and files (such as those that come with Office 365 groups/Teams)
  • Use SharePoint when you need to recover files deleted from Team OneDrive folders.
  • Use SharePoint to create custom lists and views to use within your Teams.
    • Create a single list, but with multiple views filtered by various criteria to make the list easier to interact with.
    • Examples: Task list, risk log, issue log, team roster, curated hyperlinks lists.
  • Use SharePoint custom lists when you need more interactive capability than Excel Online can provide.

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

  • Create custom lists in SharePoint and use them as tabs within your Team.  This can be particularly useful if you have a view that you want the team to see.
    • Example: Use one master task list.  Create views for your phased releases, and add those views as separate tabs to your Team.
  • Microsoft Project can export to a SharePoint task list.  This can save time, as you can have your team interact with the SharePoint task list.  Create a Gantt view from the task list and show that in the Team.

Stream

Microsoft Stream channels and videos can be added as a tab in Microsoft Teams, making it easy for your team to collaborate using video.

 

Training and Additional Information for Stream

About

  • Microsoft Stream is a video hosting platform to securely share and discover video within the University of Chicago.
  • Smart searching and autocreated captioning for uploaded videos
  • Create channels to showcase videos.
  • Videos can be shared to all of campus or to just a smaller group (at this time public access to videos is not supported.)

Common Use Cases

  • Create a channel for your department or division to showcase what your area is doing.
  • Viewing previously recorded events, classes, lectures
  • Host help videos for staff, faculty, and students
  • Embed videos in University of Chicago internally focused websites
  • Follow channels and watch videos shared to campus

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

  • Post your videos to a channel to make them easier to organize.
  • Mount your channel to your Team for easy viewing by your Team
  • Let Stream create your auto caption files.  After it takes a first pass, follow these instructions to download a copy of the auto-created caption file to make corrections, then re-upload the file.
    • Upload the video, click the autocaption.
    • Go to my videos, then edit the video.  Unclick the autocaption, and then follow the instructions to download the VTT file.
    • Once you have the VTT file locally, edit it in a text editor, fix the captions, then upload them back to the server (edit the video, then upload the caption file.)
  • Enable a table of contents for your video
    • In the description, on separate lines, type times (M:SS format) and a description of that point
      • 0:35 – Interesting comment here
      • 2:15 – Next speaker
  • Add hashtags in your description to enable easier searching
    • #office365, #stream, #topic, #ssd
  • Add a picture for your channel
  • Customize the thumbnail for your video to show what you want.
  • If you are sharing videos solely to a Team, customize the permission to be only open to that Team.
  • Add a second owner for your videos
  • Customize your URL to add a timestamp if you want the video to start in a specific place.
  • Use a watchlist to create a custom watchlist with videos from multiple channels.
  • Follow a channel that you are interested in.

Sway

Sway provides the ability to easily compile text, images, videos, and other content in an interactive online format. You can apply designer-created layouts and color schemes, or let Sway suggest design elements that match your content. Search and import relevant content from other sources, and share your completed Sways on the web.

 

Training and Additional Information for Sway

Common Use Cases

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

Support

To-Do

Microsoft To-Do is a time management app that makes it easy to plan and manage your day. Microsoft To-Do delivers a personal and intuitive way to help people stay organized.

 

Training and Additional Information for To-Do

About

  • To-Do provides a quick and easy way to add items to a personal to-do list and work them on any device: iOS, Android, web, or desktop clients.
  • Use the My Day feature start the day with a clean slate: focus in on the tasks that you want to work on today.
    • Add items in the morning, then cross them off as you complete them.
    • Use Intelligent Suggestions (click the light bulb) to have To-Do suggest tasks from your To-Do list to work on today
  • To-Do integrates with Microsoft Outlook.  Manage your personal tasks in either To-Do or Outlook.

Common Use Case:

  • Personal To-Do list

Training and More Information

Yammer

Yammer is a private social network that helps you get connected to the right people, share information across teams, and organize around projects. Only your coworkers can join, so your communications on Yammer are secure and visible only to people within your organization.

 

Training and Additional Information for Yammer

About

  • Yammer offers enterprise private social networking for members of the University of Chicago

Common Use Cases

  • Chatting for Interest groups and communities with membership drawn University-wide.
  • Communicate to all of campus, if they have joined the Yammer network.
  • Informational messages to all campus.

Quick Start Guide

  • Yammer is designed as a chat-based tool, and is best for public groups.
    • General Guideline: Use Yammer when you want to allow anyone on campus to join your group.  Use Teams when you want to have more restricted membership.
  • Naming Guide: Make your group name unique, and yet identifiable as to which dept or division it may belong to.  Example: BSD-HR.
  • Before adding a Yammer group:
    • Look to see if there is an established group that may fit your need.
    • Decide if your group should be public (joinable by any member of the University) or private.
    • Ensure you have a purpose for the group and that it will be of use.
  • When uploading files to public groups be sure to keep in my mind the following:
    • Files should be relevant to the group and/or current topic.
    • Files uploaded to Yammer public groups for the purpose of collaboration should never be considered final documents or deliverable items. Always recreate final documents and save elsewhere.
    • As always, files should be appropriate for professional use.
    • Guidance over what may be stored in Office 365 may be found at https://dataguide.uchicago.edu/
  • When choosing an audience be mindful of the following and think before you post:
    • Who will benefit most from my post?
    • If I am asking a question, where am I most likely to receive an appropriate answer?
    • Does my post contain too many words, or too few?
    • Is my post meaningful in any way?
    • How might the language use and tone of voice in my post be perceived?

Training and More Information

Tips and Tricks

  • Tailor your profile, and edit your notifications
    • Click the gear, then edit settings
  • Follow other people you find interesting
  • Use the newsfeed for All Company to track new activity.
  • Join groups and follow topics
    • Click the gear, edit settings, then apps.  Scroll down and click on topics.
  • Add hashtags to your posts to create new topics, and make those posts more easily searchable.