With today marking my first full year as a Microsoft Office Champion and the first anniversary of Office 365 Home Premium, it’s a day of milestones that represents how the right tools can truly make a difference. I’ve always been a Microsoft Office user but my goal over the past year has been to streamline my work across devices and platforms. Between collaborative client work, creating content for a variety of sites, and always having new devices to test for review purposes, my old work systems weren’t fitting with my new workflow. Having documents all over the place and not being able to access them whenever I needed them, regardless of where I was and what device I was using, was frustrating and inefficient so I’ve spent the past year streamlining.
Office 365 allows me to create documents on my Mac or PC (yes, I use both and yes, it works on both!), access them on any machine that I use thanks to SkyDrive (soon to be called OneDrive!) and stores them securely in the cloud for me to access later. Regardless if I’m using my MacBook at my desk, sitting on the couch with the Lenovo Yoga, pulling up a file on our centrally located HP Envy TouchSmart that’s a favorite for homework, traveling with my new Surface 2 tablet, or setting up a new machine for testing, I can simply sign into my Microsoft account and open up SkyDrive/OneDrive to find documents quickly.
Having access to my Office 365 documents via SkyDrive/OneDrive is a lifesaver. It doesn’t matter if I’m working at home, traveling, at a friends’ house, or relying solely on my smartphone. Everything I need is always right there allowing for a flexible and seamless workflow. Hooray!
And what’s the deal with the name change and how might it affect my work? Simply put- it won’t! We know it’s located in the cloud but the new name reflects how it’s your one drive for absolutely everything- hence OneDrive. Here’s a look!
Now that I’ve streamlined my workflow thanks to Office 365, what’s next? This fall I was inspired by the Microsoft Champions Summit in Seattle with my fellow Office and Windows Champions where I was inspired to lead a more paperless life with OneNote. I’ve tried various apps through the years but have never had a preference or remained loyal. I have notes all over the place making for yet another very inefficient system!
OneNote is far more robust than other note taking tools because in addition to writing text, I can also pull in photos, parts of documents like spreadsheets, and even draw, edit, and erase with my finger thanks to the wonders of Inking. On days I feel like writing instead of typing (or have left my Type Cover at home), OneNote will automatically convert my chicken scratch handwriting from my tablet into neat text. Here’s a peek at how OneNote works!
There are so many endless possibilities for me and OneNote as I strive to live a more paperless life. I can keep digital copies of important documents, family travel itineraries that can be shared with fellow travelers, organize endless work files into a single seamless document, receipts for expense reports or taxes, and more while embedding photos, videos, clips from the web, and documents into OneNote. Another fabulous feature of OneNote? If I’ve pulled in something like an Excel spreadsheet or text from a Word doc created in Office 365, OneNote will automatically be updated to reflect the changes. How’s that for seamless?
A new version of OneNote comes with the following features to increase your productivity to #GetItDone while living a more paperless life:
- New formatting options for marking up notes the way you like and the ability to access notebooks on SharePoint, Office 365 and SkyDrive Pro
- Create notebooks on the iPad as well as build, delete and rename sections
- Use Camera Scan to take pictures of documents and whiteboards or projectors and save them to OneNote
The features of Office 365 are so robust that Microsoft makes it easy to get it done anywhere and any time!
Are you one of the 3.5 million Office 365 subscribers that uses it to streamline your work flow? Do you think you could live a more paperless life with OneNote?
To view the rest of the Office Champs, go to the Microsoft Office 365 Facebook page: https://apps.facebook.com/officechampions/
As a member of #WindowsChampions I receive products for review and am a compensated member of #OfficeChamps. Amazon Affiliate links are included in this post. Some images courtesy of Microsoft.
