New Updates to Our Most Popular Office 365 Tips

Execution means everything in today’s marketplace. If you’re not making the most of Microsoft 365, then you’re falling behind. Use our updated Microsoft 365 tips to work smarter, save time and get more done (without increasing your workload).

Below, you’ll find detailed instructions for some of our most popular Office 365 tips and tricks – updated with new information and best practices for the latest version of Microsoft 365. Plus, you’ll learn how to supercharge your productivity by letting Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant do many tasks for you.

Microsoft 365 Tips for Outlook, Word, Excel & More

Outlook

More than just an email client, Microsoft Outlook has robust tools for individual and group scheduling, as well as task lists and reminders. The following tips will help you squeeze more productivity from Outlook.

1. Ask Copilot to Summarize Your Unread Emails

Copilot is a game-changer for Microsoft 365. Specifically within Outlook, one great way to use it is to get a quick breakdown of the unread messages in your inbox, so you don’t have to manually comb through every message. There are a few ways to do this. Once Copilot is enabled in Outlook, check your inbox for the option to “Catch Up with Copilot.” In this pane, you’ll already see a few bullet points about key messages. But you can also hit the “Start Catchup” button to get individual summaries for each email. Alternatively, when viewing each message (or a thread), you can tap “Summarize” for a quick, concise summary of the key points.

Since Copilot is synced across your M365 account, you can also access it from other apps. For example, you can access it in Teams to get caught up on all emails related to an ongoing project.

How to get a summary of your Outlook emails from within Teams:

1. Click the Copilot tab on the left panel.
2. Enter a prompt that asks Copilot to summarize the emails you’re interested in and hit the send button.

Be very specific in your prompt. That’s the key to maximizing all our Copilot 365 tips. For example, your prompt could say: “Summarize key emails from the past week related to the ABC Project. Organize a bullet-point list of any actions or requests where I am mentioned.”

Back in Outlook, you can also use Copilot to help draft your emails, suggest writing improvements or even check the tone of your message.

2. Declutter Your Email with Focused Inbox

Focused Inbox is an Outlook feature that automatically classifies your emails so that you only see the messages that matter to you. It prioritizes emails from important senders, like coworkers, while hiding lower-priority messages from retailers, newsletter subscriptions and other external senders. Those messages aren’t deleted; they’re just moved to a separate folder (away from your inbox), so you can review them later, if you want. This is one of our favorite M365 / Office 365 tips, because it only takes a second to activate but saves you endless time deleting unwanted emails during your workday.

How to enable Focused Inbox in Word:

1. In Outlook, select View > View Settings.
2. In Mail > Layout, select the account you want to apply the settings to.
3. To turn it on – Select “Sort messages into Focused and Other.”

That’s it. Low-priority emails are banished from your inbox. You can disable this feature at any time by repeating the steps above and select “Don’t sort my messages.”

3. Recall a Sent Email

Yes, this is one of our old-school Office 365 tips, but it’s still a lifesaver. We all know the feeling of instant dread when sending an email too quickly. Regardless of whether you chose the wrong set of words or the wrong recipient, your heart can sink with one click of your mouse. If you use Outlook as your email client, you can have a second chance to undo it using the recall function.

How to recall emails in Outlook:

1. Navigate to your Sent Items folder and double-click the message you wish to bring back.
2. Select File > Info
3. Select Message Resend and Recall > Recall This Message and you have a choice to select two options: Delete unread copies of this messageto recall the sent message; or: Delete unread copies and replace with a new message– this will replace your sent message with a new message that you can edit/compose based off the original.
4. If desired, check the box to Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient.
5. Click the OK button.

Email recall might not work for every recipient. Also, some users will still be able to see your original recalled message, along with a message that you’ve recalled it. In this case, the Recall function acts more like a courtesy notification to recipients to let them know they can ignore the message. So for added protection, you might want to add a delay to the Send function as an alternative to the Recall function.

Note that you lose control over your email after sending it to an external recipient who uses Gmail, Yahoo or other email servers, so Recall only works if you use Outlook with a Microsoft Exchange account, and your recipient uses the same Exchange server. If you do not know if you use an Exchange account, check the email tab from the Account Settings window (accessed from the File menu).

4. Automate Recurring Tasks and Filing with Quick Steps

Use Outlook for M365 to automate repetitive tasks, such as inviting a particular group of people to meetings or forwarding emails to a group. You can also automate sequences to perform functions such as moving or deleting messages.

Back up your Quick Steps, so you do not have to recreate them manually if something goes wrong with your Outlook application. The process requires MFCMAPI, which gives you access to your mailbox data. You must download MFCMAPI from the Microsoft Open Source website and install it. (Note, we also strongly recommend using Backupify to create backups of all your M365 data, including your Outlook Quick Steps.)

The Quick Steps feature includes several templates for automating Outlook tasks, so you can save time using the following steps:

1. In Mail, navigate to Home
2. Next, navigate to the Quick Steps group, within the Quick Steps gallery, and select “Create new” Quick Step.
3. Enter a name for your new Quick step in the Name box.
4. Under the Actions option, choose the action that you want the Quick Step to do. For any additional actions, select Add Action.
5. You also have the option to create a keyboard shortcut: go to the Shortcut key box and select the shortcut you want to assign.

Next, use the following steps:

1. Open MFCMAPI.
2. Accept any prompts from the application until you see the primary window.
3. Click Session and then Logon from the main menu.
4. Choose the profile you wish to backup from the Choose Profile dialog box. A window will open that shows all your mailboxes and .pst files used with Outlook. Double-click on the mailbox for which you want to create a Quick Steps backup.
5. Expand the Root – Mailbox or Root Container folder in the navigation panel.
6. Look for a folder called Top Information Store, IPM_SUBTREE or Top of Outlook Data File and expand it.
7. Find the folder called Quick Step Settings and right click on it. From the context menu, choose Export Folder and then As MSG files.
8. In the Save Folder Contents to MSG, check both check boxes and then click OK.
9. Use the Browse for Folder option to find a location to store your Quick Steps backup. The system will save each Quick Step as a file, so you might want to create a new folder to store your backup.
10. Click OK to start exporting your data.
11. Close the open windows to shut down MFCMAPI or repeat steps 4 through 10 to backup Quick Steps from other mailboxes.

SharePoint

SharePoint is an essential platform for communication. It enables organizations to create team sites for sharing information, files and resources, both internally and externally. This platform is already built for high-scale productivity, but below we highlight one of the best Microsoft 365 tips for maximizing SharePoint’s communication capabilities.

5. Use Alert Me to be Notified of File Updates

The Alert Me function in SharePoint is an essential feature for monitoring the status of a file, link or folder. When enabled, the Alert Me function will notify you by email or text message whenever files have been updated in a SharePoint document library. For example, maybe you’re waiting for a team member to finish their portion of a project before you can add your contributions. You’ll be notified automatically when the file is updated, so you don’t have to constantly check it manually. Or maybe you’re worried about somebody making changes to a document that you already completed. The Alert Me feature will notify you of changes, ensuring accountability.

How to enable Alert Me in SharePoint:

1. Go to the list or library.
2. Select any file, link, or folder for which you want to receive an alert.
3. Select “…” (ellipses) > Alert Me.
4. Under “Alert me when items change,” select and change the options you want and select OK.

PowerPoint

For decades, PowerPoint has been a must-have tool for presentations. But the integration of Copilot has made it even easier and faster to create clean, professional-looking decks – even if you have zero design skills or experience with PowerPoint.

6. Use Copilot to Create a PowerPoint from an Existing File.

Let’s say you have a detailed business proposal for a startup company, but now you need to present the key points to stakeholders. Copilot can create an entire PowerPoint presentation for you in seconds by simply analyzing your existing proposal.

How to create a PowerPoint using Copilot:

1. Open PowerPoint in M365
2. Tap the Copilot button in the ribbon to open the chat.
3. Click the ✨ AI spark icon, then select “Create a presentation from a file,” or type “Create a presentation from /[FileName]” – and select the appropriate file stored in M365, then hit the send button.

You can fine-tune the prompt with any parameters you desire, such as the maximum number of pages, the focus of the presentation, sections that should be removed and so on. Once the presentation is created, you can use additional prompts to edit and improve it. For example, you can ask Copilot to add more slides, trim down text, make the presentation more visual or pull relevant information from the web.

Teams

Teams is the heart of communications and collaboration tool in M365. It powers your meetings, video calls, chats, file sharing and more. And now with Copilot integration, it can make your workday so much easier.

7. Use Copilot to Catch up on What You Missed from a Meeting

If you missed a meeting, or you joined a few minutes late, Copilot can get you caught up. When you join, simply tap the Copilot button and it will automatically give you a concise recap with the key points you missed. But you can also ask Copilot to provide specific information, such as unresolved questions that are waiting for your input, or how a specific participant responded to a presentation.

How to use Copilot in Teams:

1. In a Teams meeting (or recorded call), click the Copilot button from the meeting controls.
2. A summary of the meeting will populate in a pane on the right side.
3. Prompt Copilot with any questions you have about the meeting, such as: “Did Jane approve Project ABC to move forward? What roadblocks were discussed?”

You can also ask Copilot to create a document based on the meeting, such as a table with pros and cons discussed by the team. (Just note that the meeting must be transcribed for this tip to work, or the meeting organizer must enable Copilot without transcription.)

8. Prioritize Your Most Important Chats with Pins

If you’re being inundated with chats in Teams, then it can be frustrating to lose track of the conversations that are the highest priority. Thankfully, you can pin those chats, so they stay at the top of the list. Pinning chats stops them being buried by all the other conversations. It’s a great way to keep your eyes on chats related to certain projects or those you need to respond to later.

How to use pins in Teams:

1. In Teams, hover over any chat in your list of recent conversions.
2. Select “More options” (represented by three dots), then Pin.
3. Your pinned chat will now stay at the top of the list, until you unpin it.

Bonus tip: You can also give a chat a unique name. This helps it stand out from the rest or remind you what it’s about. For example: “Project XYZ,” or “Conference recap.”

Excel

The latest version of Excel for M365 comes with many impressive new features that make your work faster and easier, especially when Copilot is integrated. Use these Microsoft 365 tips to get a taste of what Excel can do for you.

9. Use Copilot to Analyze Data & Find Trends

Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant can help you with almost any Excel task, from understanding data to organizing sheets, tables and graphs. One of our favorite tips is using Copilot to make sense of raw data in a spreadsheet.

How to use Copilot in Excel:

1. Open Excel in M365
2. Open a workbook (from OneDrive or SharePoint)
3. Tap the Copilot button on the ribbon
4. Enter a prompt that asks Copilot to analyze the data and summarize the key trends.

Example prompt: “Analyze the year-to-date business results and summarize 3 key trends.”

Of course, you can also use Copilot to edit, create and organize your spreadsheets without manually adding formulas. For example, you could prompt it to “Add a new column displaying the % change from column A and column B,” or “Create a bar chart showing the revenue growth between Q1 and Q3.”

10. Forecast from Historical Data

Businesses use forecasts to set budgets and purchase supplies, but generating accurate data can present a challenge. Thankfully, Excel for M365 has a great feature that lets you create charts showing projections generated from time-based data stored in a spreadsheet. The function calculates the “bounds of confidence” and provides estimates for the margin of error using the Exponential Smoothing (ETS) algorithm.

Now, use the below steps to fetch files from a Windows computer:

1. Open or create a worksheet with two corresponding data series. Use a set with your data and another one with time or date values for your timeline that has regular intervals so that you can get the best possible results. Select both sets of data with your mouse.
2. Click on Excel’s Data tab and then click the Forecast Sheet icon.
3. Choose either a line or column chart from the Create Forecast Worksheet window.
4. Enter an end date and time in the Forecast End box and then click the Create button to generate the forecast worksheet.
5. Customize your forecast by clicking Options.

11. Import and Refresh Data from the Web

Have you ever needed to update a spreadsheet using data found online? If so, you can end the tedious process of repeatedly navigating to a web page, copying the data and pasting it into Excel. Use a one-time process to bring up-to-date information from a web page and after that update your data by clicking your mouse.

The process works well with correctly formatted HTML tables, but you can invest some time and effort to bring freeform data into your spreadsheet as well.

Import Web data using the following steps:

1. Click on the New Query option from Excel’s Data tab and then choose From Web from the Other Sources list.
2. Type or paste the URL of the page that contains the data you wish to import and refresh.
3. Use the previews generated by Excel to find the table that contains the data you need. When you find it, click Load. The data will appear in your worksheet.
4. Later, refresh your data by right-clicking in the table and choosing Refresh from the context menu.

Use this tactic rather than pasting the table directly into Excel to update it conveniently without repetitive cut-and-paste processes.

12. “Unpivot” Data into Paired Values

The Unpivot feature of Excel gives you the tool you need to transform your data from columns into paired values. Known to some as changing data from “wide to long,” the feature lets you go “wide” by having multiple columns for data for each row or “long” by having a single data point per row, with the likelihood of multiple categories. In the database world, administrators describe this process as “folding” – moving data from columns into rows, which accomplishes the reverse of a pivot table. In Excel for M365 (formerly Office 365), Microsoft calls the process Get & Transform or Power Query.

Regardless of what you choose to call it, the process works in just a few steps using Excel’s Query Editor.

1. Open Query Editor from the Data ribbon inside Excel.
2. From the Get & Transform section, choose the From Table option. If your data does not have clear formatting, the feature might first ask you to define a data range. After that, select the columns you want to Unpivot.
3. Click the Transform tab and then choose Unpivot Columns.
4. After executing the Unpivot, you will see two new columns at the right called Attribute and Value.
5. Rename the columns to anything that makes sense to you.
6. Save your work to Excel’s default location by clicking File and then Close & Load. If you want to choose an alternate location, select the Close & Load To option. If you close without saving, you will have a chance to save your changes to a new worksheet.

13. Extract Data from Dynamics 365 CRM to Standard Word and Excel Documents

This is one of our more technical Office 365 tips, but it’s a good one for power users. If your company has chosen the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, you have access to templates for Word and Excel that draw from its data. The tools help you save time and improve accuracy by setting up a primary document that you can use to send or print the same type of material frequently. After extracting the data to your Office document, you can customize it for your particular purpose.

Start using Word templates with Dynamics CRM using the following steps:

1. From inside Dynamics CRM, navigate to Templates section of your settings.
2. In the Templates section, click the Document Templates efforts.
3. You will now see a list of templates to choose from. You can use one of the templates now or click the New option to create a new one.
4. After clicking New, you can choose between creating a Word or Excel template.
5. Click on Word Template. Under Select data, choose Contact from the dropdown box.
6. Click the Select Entity button from one-to-many, many-to-many or many-to-one relationships. Your choice will depend on the purpose of your document.
7. For this example, choose the many-to-one relationship called Account.
8. Click Open in the dialog box. You will see your template open in Microsoft Word.
9. Set up XML Mapping by clicking on the Developers tab, then click XML Mapping. Choose urn:microsoft-crm/document-template/[entity name]/.
10. Expand the Contact by clicking the arrow on the left. You will see available field controls that you can insert into your document.
11. Scroll to full name, right-click it, and then choose Insert Content Control. Select the Plain Text option. Continue inserting controls until you have the ones you need.
12. Name your template and save it.
13. Back in Dynamics, navigate to Settings and then Templates.
14. Click the Upload template option.
15. Here you can drag your saved template file from Windows to the Upload Template box or use the interface to navigate to your file and upload it.
16. When the document template loads, enter the Properties and Name.
17. CRM will auto-activate your template. Next, you will activate security.
18. Click Enable Security Roles. You can enable your template for everyone or for particular roles, such as CSR Manager.
19. Choose the appropriate security role and then click OK.
20. Use your new template by navigating to the contact record for which you need to create a document. Click the three-dot icon on the navigation bar and then choose Word Template. Choose your template from the list.

You now have your document available to send or print using information from the contact you have chosen. Create as many templates as needed to streamline your business processes.

Word

Microsoft Word has come a long way since its beginnings in the early 1980s. And now, with the integration of Copilot AI, it’s so much more than a word processor. It’s your personal assistant for writing, creativity and organization.