Five Tools to Maximise Your Microsoft 365 Investment and Productivity

Here you will discover the five tools to maximise your Microsoft 365 in investment and productivity. There is more to Microsoft 365 than Word and Excel, which is not surprising. Microsoft has enjoyed 27% year-on-year growth with now nearly 200 million commercial Microsoft 365 users worldwide. Microsoft have therefore heavily invested into 365 – to improve its features and functionality.

As a Microsoft Certified Partner, claireLOGIC have identified 5 of those more recent features which we believe can help your organisation get the most out of your 365 subscription. Allowing you to increase productivity with improved automation and team collaboration.

Microsoft Power Automate

Take productivity to new heights by automating business processes across your entire organisation. Microsoft Power Automate allows you to turn repetitive tasks into multistep workflows. For example, with a few clicks capture social media feeds and add them as leads in Dynamics 365, subscribers in Mailchimp, and much more.

You can also use Microsoft Power Automate to create, use, and share automated approval workflows to quickly respond to and process requests, from time off and travel plans to documents and sales opportunities.

Microsoft Forms

You can easily create surveys and polls to collect customer feedback, measure employee satisfaction, and organise team events. Microsoft Forms is an online survey creator which is included with Microsoft 365. Released by Microsoft in June 2016, Forms allows you to create surveys and quizzes with automatic marking. The data can be exported to Microsoft Excel too.

In addition, in 2019, Microsoft released a preview of Forms Pro which gives users the ability to export data into a Power BI dashboard.

Microsoft MyAnalytics

Work smarter with personal productivity insights in Microsoft 365. You can Explore your work patterns with MyAnalytics and learn ways to work smarter—improving your focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration. You can also Receive AI-powered suggestions in Outlook from MyAnalytics to help you set aside focus time before your week fills up with meetings, stay on top of tasks and emails, and follow up with important people.

MyAnalytics can improve your work patterns. Understand and improve your work patterns—gaining uninterrupted time to focus, being able to disconnect and recharge, and networking and collaborating effectively—with help from the MyAnalytics dashboard and weekly email digest.

Microsoft Planner

Organise teamwork with Microsoft Planner. Take the chaos out of teamwork and get more done! Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organise and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress.

With Microsoft Planner you can get organised quickly without the need to purchase additional third party tools.

You can launch Planner from your 365 app launcher with a single click. You can then create a new plan, build a team, assign tasks, and update status—in a few easy steps.

Each plan has its own board, where you can organize tasks into buckets. You can categorize tasks based on their status or on whom they’re assigned to. To update the status or change assignments, just drag and drop tasks between columns.

Microsoft PowerApps

For more advanced users or aspiring “App-Makers” you can make Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 your own with powerful apps that span productivity and business data. Customise SharePoint Online, use PowerApps with Microsoft Teams, and build apps on Dynamics 365.

Build apps fast with a point-and-click approach to app design. Choose from a large selection of templates or start from a blank canvas. 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.

Getting more out of Microsoft 365

We hope you found the tools useful, if you need any assistance in putting these tools into practice or simply wish to discuss how to get the most out of your Microsoft 365 subscription then please don’t hesitate to get in contact with the claireLOGIC team on 01865 989144.