Sharing and Collaborating on Documents in MS 365

So welcome everyone to today's staff training or team training, and we are going to cover kind of communication and collaboration in Office 365, what is now called Microsoft 365 as of the 21st, because we aren't dealing with enough change already, so Microsoft decided to change the name of the product for everybody. So for people like me who got really used to calling it Office 365, I have to correct myself constantly. But there's a couple couple of things that are really easy to use to share files, whether you're sharing a whole lot of files with members or if you're sharing just an individual file. And you can actually collaborate on a file in real time, live, with comments and all that. So that is what we're gonna do. A lot of you probably are not using OneDrive, but that is the application that kind of drives this. So, and you're probably familiar with Dropbox. You may be using Dropbox, but, and you can still use Dropbox, but OneDrive is something that we all have, but you may never have used it before. So first thing is where the heck is OneDrive on your computer? And so what I actually have a little link, but if you didn't have the link, then you would just go to your browser and type in office.com. And then it'll ask you to log in with your network username and password. And once you've done that, these are all the things that you get with the Office subscription. And so one of them is OneDrive. And I actually have my local drive synced with OneDrive, but you probably don't. You've probably still been using the file server or you've been using Dropbox or something like that, but you do have this so you can take advantage of it. So I'm just going to click on OneDrive, and what that does is it opens up, and like I said, I'm actually using this to sync my local files so it's a little bit easier, but it's no big deal. You can still do this. So the first kind of scenario we're gonna walk through is if you have a need to share a bunch of files with someone in the organization. So for instance, last week I worked with Kristen and Uniqua to do 2 hours worth of CLE programming, and they require PowerPoints and materials. And so the PowerPoints for this were particularly big, and emailing them individually works, but one I think was 20 megs. It was a big file, and there's always the opportunity for that not to go through or whatever. So in best practices world, what we would do would be we would actually share the folder with someone. So because you're probably not already syncing this, what I'm going to do is show you how to create a new folder. So you just click New and Folder, and then we're gonna say, uh, NCBI SFT, um, C*files. So give it a name just like normal, and then you'll see the folder down here. So I'm going to click into the folder, and then if you don't have any files already in there, then you're going to drag your files over. So in this case, I'll go and go into my Windows Explorer and drag these folders over here, the files over here. So give me one second, and I'm going to pick up the files that I want to share with them. Now, what's— I'll show you just out of— just to show, this is what I've got. I don't necessarily want them to see all the versions that I've gone through and the other files that I might have used. This is just to share what they need. So I'm going to drag all the final stuff over into here. And depending on the size of the files, it may take a second. And it is taking a second because, like I said, I have two ginormous PowerPoints. And I'll tell you, one of the benefits of doing this is that if I make a change to one of these files, like I did, I kind of went old school with Uniqua and I sent her the files as attachments and then immediately remembered that there was a new slide that they had requested that I put in there. So of course then I had to make the change and send her another file. If you share the files like this, you don't have to go through that rigmarole. So this is much better in terms of I don't have to email her an attachment every time I make a change to a file. She basically, these files are kind of live. If I make a change to one on my desktop, the file will be changed here in the folder as well. So she's constantly getting the uploaded version. And so the next thing we wanna do is share. This with Unequa. So I'm just gonna go up here and click on— actually, I'm gonna back up a little bit and I'm gonna share the whole folder. So we're gonna find this folder. I'm going to mouse over it and this little button here is the sharing button. Right now, the way you can tell whether you shared something with someone or not is it shows you right now these are all private. These are shared with someone. So once I go here and click on this, it pops up a little thing and you've got a number of options. So if I click on that, you can see who has— I can send anyone with the link, which we're gonna talk about that option, people in the North Carolina Bar with the link, and people with existing access in case you need to update it or something like that, and then specific people. So we're gonna click on specific people. Specific people. And I'm going to, I can allow editing or not. And click on apply. And then it's gonna basically say, well, who is it that you want to share this with? In this case, I'll share it with Uniqua and Kristen. And because they're, these people are within our Office 365 environment, it's really easy to find people under the network to pop it up. When you try to do this with someone outside of our organization, then you may have to copy and paste their email address in it, 'cause it takes a second. Then I can add a message. And then I can go ahead and click Send and it will send it off to them. If I wanted to copy the link and send it through a different method, like through Slack or something like that, I could copy the link, go into Slack, and send it to them this way. Or if I click on Outlook, it basically is going to open it up in Outlook. So if I needed to send a longer message, if I wanted to you know, do other things. It basically puts their email addresses in. You put the subject. Here's the folder. But if I needed to, you know, draft another, a longer document, I can send it through Outlook. But I'm not going to do that. So, right, and I didn't send it. So let's see. And Kristen. Here you go. And I'm just gonna click Send. So that's been sent, and that actually shows up in my outbox in Outlook. So you can see that you sent it. And now that you've done that, you can see that this little icon has change to Shared, and they have access to this folder. They'll get a link, they'll click on it, it'll pop up here, and then they'll be able to access the files in it. So it's pretty straightforward. Now, if you wanted to see what you've shared and remove permissions, then I can actually go into, like, I've shared a folder with Eric. So if I find that folder, this whole folder is shared with Eric. So if I click on Shared, then I can see who has access to it. I can also click on this little icon and, or see that he has access to edit it. I can stop sharing if I click on the little caret. Or I can change it to where he can only view the files and he can't edit them. So you have some more granular options. And if you change your mind about something, you can go back. I can also just remove his ability to be sharing. If I click on Advanced, you get a whole lot of other options that opens up in SharePoint. So you'll probably never need to do this, so don't bother with advanced. It's pretty much all there. So that's how you share with people internally. Now one thing I will note, I shared the whole folder with Eric, but there was one document that I shared with someone else. So if I go into this folder, and I click on Shared, I can see that in addition to Eric having kind of folder access, I also, for this one file, gave Jennifer access to it. And again, I can stop sharing it with her. I can change her permissions. I can remove her, you know, and all this kind of other stuff. I can go in and change again whether she can view or whether she can edit. So you have a lot of granular access, but basically it's named user and whether they can edit it, and then you can remove the permissions. So that's all what you can do with a folder. Now, what if you want to share this with a member? It's the same process, but slightly different. So I'm gonna go back into My Files, and this is actually one that I shared with a member yesterday, and this was just a test. We were playing around with it. So I created the folder like I did before by going into New and creating the folder, dragging some files into it, and then I clicked on the Share button again and added it. Now this is where we change tactics slightly because what you want to do is instead of people you specify can view, when you do that, it basically makes them log into Microsoft 365.. And when you're sharing with people outside the organization, if they've given it, like if our members gave us their Gmail account, um, for their work with the bar, but they're actually their Office 365 accounts through their, um, firm, then when they get the link to their Gmail account, it is gonna ask them to log in and you don't wanna ask them to create a new login or anything like that. For lawyers, um, there's privacy issues and security issues. For us, we're just sharing files with our members, so you don't have to worry about too much of it. But if you're sharing with a member, I think the thing that is best practices is click on Anyone with the Link. And so you'll see that you get some slightly different options when you click on Anyone with the Link. And this is literally anybody who clicks on the link, it will open up in the browser for them. They don't have to create a username and password. They don't have to log in. They don't have to do anything. I've really never had much problem with anybody understanding how this works. And it's very much like Dropbox or Google Drive or things like that. So we're gonna go again with members. I would just choose anyone with a link. And then you can choose whether or not they can just download the files or whether they can actually edit the files. You can also set an expiration date. Can't really think of why we would need to do this, but you can. And then the other thing, and if this information is sensitive in any way, you can set a password. And send the password separately from the link. So if you were worried about other people getting access to it for some reason, if they shared the link, because we hadn't set any kind of security on it, if somebody shared the link, anybody with the link can access it, thus anyone with the link. So you could add a password to it if you're paranoid. And then we're gonna click Apply. And then again, I'm gonna, I'll just send it to myself., and this is where, because this person is not part of the, our single sign-on database in Exchange, you have to type their whole email address, and then you select it, and then it will note this user is outside your organization, just as a friendly reminder, and then Same kind of thing. Add a message or copy the link and send it in a separate email or open up Outlook and add more detail to it. And then I'm gonna say— Now the one thing is when I share things with people who are not named, when I click on the little Shared button, all it does is it shows me that I have given permission. In this case, with Heather yesterday, her version of the share has a password, and then this one I didn't. So it, again, it shows you kind of like what you've done, everything that you've done, how you've done it. I can remove her permission. Right now she has view-only permission. I set the password. I can change the password. So on and so forth. So that's kind of how you would do this with members. If you needed to share a full folder full of files, I would go with the anyone with a link. And then you can kind of see what you've done. So that's basically it. It's pretty straightforward, and this is the probably best practices for sharing multiple documents in a folder with someone either in NCBA or with a member outside of NCBA. So the next thing I'm going to do is show you kind of individual sharing of a document. So I'm gonna drag Microsoft Word over here. And I already shared this this morning with some testers, but if I have a document up and I want to share just this document— and here's where the real power comes in— if I want to share this document and I want to give them access to edit it at the same time that I am, rather than going back and forth attaching email, especially again in my use case with CLE, often they may wanna add something, change something. So I open up the document that I'm working on, and when I'm ready to send it to them, then I just click up here in the upper right, the Share button, and it's basically the same exact thing with the folders. So you've got people you specify, that would be internal, or anyone with the link, and that would be external. And as you can see, with specific people in the organization, you can click on allow editing, you can block download. This, by the way, the people in North Carolina with link, if I wanted to send everybody in the organization or 6 people in the organization the link, but they then shared it with other people, anybody in the association could have access to this. So it just depends on how tight you want the sharing to go. If I click on Anyone with a Link, then you'll see I have some other options. Again, the allow editing, the expiration date, and the password, and then block download. With specific people, I don't have the ability to set a password because they're already in our organization. So I guess Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decides that we don't need to set a password with people internally. So once I do that, and we'll just allow editing. Once you allow editing, you cannot block them from downloading it. If you don't click that and you just wanted to have a view only, turn on block editing, but we're gonna allow them editing rights. And then I'm going to add this, I'll add myself again, but my Gmail. And again, it warns us this person is outside. Review and Edit. And then same thing, you can copy the link, you can save it or send it through Outlook, although it really is going through Outlook. The other thing is you'll see the Send a Copy that we didn't see in the folder share. So if you click on that, I can— it can automatically attach a PDF of this Word document that will attach when you're sending it. I've really never figured out what the use cases for that, or this, or the Word version, because what I really want them to do is open this and edit it so I can see the edits. So we won't do that. And then I'll click on Send. So I already did this with Dan and Cheyenne. So once you've shared this document, you can then see what people have done. So in this case, they opened the document. Dan just wrote a little note for me. If I wanted to revert back, so he basically opened it in the browser, but if he didn't open it in the browser, he actually downloaded and opened it in Word, it would still save it to where I could see the changes. And I'm gonna show you an example of how I've done that with other people outside the organization for collaboration. But Dan wrote me a note, and then Cheyenne Wrote me a note here. If I wanted to go back and figure out— now what you can do before you ever send this out is turn on track changes, and then when you open the document on your desktop, any changes will show as track changes. But if you forget to do that and you want to be able to see any changes that were made, when you open the document up at the top on the kind of left-hand side, there's this little box, and if I click on it, then it shows me the file name, where it's stored, and then the version history. And so if I click on the version history, again, if you don't name the individual that you've given permission to make changes, it will just say guest user. But if, if they're named users, then I can see this was modified by Cheyenne at 9:38 AM, and Dan and Cheyenne were both in there making changes. We discovered that they can't change the same line at the same time, which is probably good. And you can see the whole kind of history of your sharing and the versions that were created. So if I wanted to revert back to my original, then I click on Open Version, and you have some options. You can copy contents from this version, save it as a separate file, or I can compare to a different version. And this invokes the, the document comparison tool in Microsoft Word. So basically you can see the revisions, you can see what Dan did, and then this is the original and this is the revision. So it It basically adds those track changes for you. So you don't have to necessarily worry too much about it. But if we go back and I decide I want to restore to my original version, then I click on Restore. And I'm back to my original version. It has a new name, so I'll just give it a, you know, I'll rename the file. So that's kind of a little bit more complicated, but it's really useful. And I'll show you again, my use case is not usually in Word. And then you can see that the last modified date is just now. And you can go back and if you, you know, you restored the first version, but if you want to go back and look at the other versions, the whole version history is all still there. And then the thing that we didn't do is use this comments button. So let me go into— please, I'm about to show you my Gmail, which is a little horrifying, and I don't know if this will work, but this is what it looks like when I share the folder with someone. They get the email that I shared a folder with them, and they click on it. So that's easy enough. And then when I shared this individual file shared a file with me. Please review and edit. Now this is going to me. This is what the person that you share it with sees. When I share a file like this, the other thing is in Outlook I get a confirmation that I shared this document with Unequa and I can open it. So this basically confirms to me that I shared this document. And then once Unequa opened the document, I got an email confirmation that she clicked on it, which is very useful because, you know, it's like I sent this document, but I don't have to necessarily track whether or not she got it, whether she opened it, because if she clicks on the link, I'll get email notification that she did in fact click on it. The other thing is this fun little note. If you didn't expect this to happen, you can go back and remove her permissions. So if you accidentally share a file with someone, which I really can't see that you would, but if you did, you can revoke their permissions from the email notification. So if I go and open this document It opens it in Word Online. I can download it because I've given this person, being me, the ability to do that. And then I can choose whether I'm making edits or just reviewing. If I'm just reviewing, then without making changes to the document, I can make comments in the document somewhere, somewhere probably out of sight on my screen, but you can make comments. So I'm gonna go and show you where I've done this before with some success, and for me it's often PowerPoints. So I had For Tech Show, we had a big PowerPoint that 4 of us were working on. So for the 60 in 60, you can see, I can see that I shared it. If I click on the link, I can't see that I shared it with 4 people, but I did. And I didn't make them named because they were all outside of our organization. I can stop sharing. If I want to, if I'm like ready to finalize the document. And then they all were able to open this PowerPoint and make changes to it. And then once we had finalized it, I just opened it in PowerPoint on my desktop and created a copy called Not Shared, 'cause I wanted to be able to share till the last minute. But you can see even from the desktop, I can share with more people. We can add comments. And then on the desktop, I could revert back to previous versions. So it's, you know, it's pretty straightforward to use to be able to share a document with someone else so they can edit it. I often find that I do this with PowerPoints. But obviously, if you're working on language, for any reason with someone and you put it in Word, then you can have multiple people kind of wordsmithing a document, which I think is a lot more straightforward than trying to email a document back and forth, trying to keep up with the versions, trying to keep up with the changes and all that. So this I think is a more elegant way of having multi-author collaboration in a single document, which hopefully you may or may not at some point be able to use. So that's pretty much it. I put a few little slides together for you just to give you a reminder of what we're talking about. You know how to find me. I'm going to stop the recording, and thank you so much.