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Top 12 Office Hacks to Get You Through the Day

Globalquest Solutions

Top 12 Office Hacks to Get You Through the Day

As the days become shorter and your wardrobe changes from crisp fall to accommodating the cold Western NY winter, your routine can use a little upgrade. Look at your desk right now. Is it everyday chaos or organized chaos? A cluttered to-do list coupled with a cluttered mind does not help productivity. Luckily, these 12 office hacks will help you become more organized to efficiently get you through the day.

Bookmark Important Content in Teams

Have you ever spent hours scrolling through a chat when you are looking for a small piece of information from a month ago? The bookmark function allows you to flag important items from chats and save items from posts. Simply hover over an item and select Flag. You will see a list of bookmarked chats and posts in your flagged items.

Continuous Syncing

Regardless of the time zone employees are in, having different versions of documents in different locations can be incredibly inefficient. However, when using Office 365 and SharePoint, multiple teammates can work in the same document at the same time, and the software automatically syncs changes.

Convert Important Corporate Documents to Digital

Converting manuals, style guides, and other large documents, like the corporate employee handbook, to a PDF file then adding it to Teams or SharePoint greatly saves on printing costs while allowing employees to access it from all devices. It also gives users the option of searching and accessing specific information which saves time. Company policies continually change so storing the handbook online allows for easy and fast updates.

Download the OneDrive for Business and Sync Mobile App

The OneDrive for Business mobile app allows you to work from anywhere through the Cloud and there is another important app for when you cannot get internet coverage: the Sync App. After downloading the app, logging into Office 365, and accessing OneDrive, choose the library you wish to access offline and hit the Sync button. This powerful app allows each user to sync up to 20,000 files and folders.

Have Teams Transcribe

One of the most time saving and underutilized Teams tips is to record Teams meetings and let the software transcribe the notes for you. Best of all, you can even go back and transcribe previous recordings. Simply open the recording, hit Edit, choose English under Video Language, click Auto-generate a Caption File, then click Apply.

Save Documents to OneDrive

If you are emailed attachments or have files on your desktop or a common drive, you can easily download them to OneDrive for access from all devices. When you know exactly where your files are and how they are organized, you can save a significant amount of time by not having to search. To save email attachments, select Save All to OneDrive. To move folders from your desktop or a common drive to OneDrive, simply cut and paste into the OneDrive folder.

Schedule Time to Review Emails

Since Outlook has become the primary email client, you can receive hundreds of emails per day. Block time off on your calendar each day to review emails so you do not miss important information.

Shift Communication to Teams

Since Teams is so well integrated into Office 365, you can forward and post emails directly into Teams for the entire group. Simply choose the channel you wish to message, press the ellipsis icon, then click Get Email Address. Finally, copy and paste this email address into the email and it will populate in Teams. This is a much more efficient option compared to writing to each staff email and potentially missing a teammate.

Temporarily Ignore Notifications

The gurus behind Office 365 realize that notifications can be incredibly beneficial and a major hindrance when trying to work without distractions. One excellent Office tip is to turn off the email popups in the lower right corner and any other notifications when you need time to focus on a task.

Use the SharePoint Countdown Timer

This fun Office 365 tip allows you to add a countdown timer to the web section of SharePoint. This is important to keep your team or other departments in the loop about company milestones and important future dates. It can even be used as a reminder for the Christmas party, birthdays, or the launch of a new product. Adding the countdown to SharePoint is as simple as navigating to the target page, selecting Edit, hitting the Plus sign, and choosing the Countdown Timer icon.

Utilize the Recurring Meeting Function

Schedules, dates, and, once the world reopens, meeting rooms often change. Therefore, setting up recurring meetings through your Outlook calendar will help sort out this confusion and prevent overcrowded calendars. If you need to change the meeting just cancel it for that week and send a new meeting time and date separately.

Visualizing your Data

When working in an office, it quickly becomes clear that your colleagues all read and learn differently. Therefore, when you have big data that could be difficult to navigate or you need to present a summary to upper management, graphs help visualize this information. Excel offers a variety of graphs and charts to convert the data into a clean and easy-to-read visual.

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