Personal Project Event Team Management Example Using OneNote OneDrive Excel and Microsoft Teams

All right. Hi everybody. Randall F. Dean here, the Email Sanity Expert. Wanted to come out and share with you what I consider a very personal example of how you can utilize some of the more basic Microsoft 365 tools for project and event management. Let me explain to you what I did. Um, we have my daughter's upcoming high school graduation party coming up very quickly. And it's actually more of a complicated event than you might think. Uh, so I actually utilized the same tools I would use in a company setting to put together a project work group or team in a typical corporate or organizational setting to put together this party. So let me explain to you how I did this utilizing popular tools like OneNote, OneDrive, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Teams. Let's dive in and show you what I did. So the first thing that I did is I actually did a brainstorm using the OneNote app right on my phone, and I actually did the voice-to-text. I just started brainstorming everything out of my head that we had to do and also captured the things I knew we had already started doing, because, you know, we actually started some of the pre-planning on this all the way back end of last year. So I captured the initial thoughts into OneNote, and then I turned it into a shared note for team brainstorming. Now let me show you what I mean here. I'm going to go into my OneNote. And as you can see here in the background, there is the Grad Party Brainstorm. So I actually dropped it under my Honeydew notebook, created a new page called Grad Party Brainstorm. And then what I did is not only did I put all of the tasks down that I could think of, then I did a share and I shared it with both my wife and my daughter. To allow us to get all of this out of our heads and try to start putting it together. And then what I did was I took the output of this, and actually, I kid you not, I did the next step that I'm about to show you sitting in the parking lot at my daughter's dance studio on my phone. Okay, so I did this on my phone. I did a copy and paste from the OneNote, which you see right here on the screen, using the phone app, and I pulled it into this spreadsheet, which basically dropped and pasted everything down the column. I added in owner, due date, and complete, and expense columns. Now I also added in the initials of who I thought would own the task. Then using the backend of OneDrive I did a share again, and in the sharing, what I did is I set it up so that both my wife and my daughter could have access to this and provide input. And so what happened was my wife, uh, actually came in, and one of the things we wanted to do is sort of track our expenses as we did this, and she added in some of the expense figures for a lot of this. Now, doing that, knowing the structure— because I just recently did a full webinar on how you can use OneNote, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams all together together. I actually shared this as an example in there, and I wanted to show how you would set this up in Microsoft Teams. So what I did is I went into Teams and I created a new team called Home Projects and Parties. I created a new tab inside of here called Hallie Grad Party. And inside the Hallie Grad Party, as you can see, what it did is it had posts and files. Now let's look at the files. Check this out. This is sort of cool. Under Files, there's that Excel spreadsheet. It pulled it right out of my OneDrive. It gave me access to the Excel spreadsheet that I built, and now that's here. And notice that if I go back up to here, in terms of Home, Projects, and Parties, I can manage the team. And underneath the team, you can see that what I did is, because neither of them are on my Microsoft Teams account, I added them in as guests. By putting in their name and email, which is super easy to do. You just come in here under the home body and hit Add Members. And what it's going to do is if they're not part of your organization, if they're part of your organization using your Teams, you can probably just type in their name and they'll probably pop up. But if they're not, you can put in their email address, allowing them to join in on the team as a guest, which we did in this case. And so they have editing and access privileges for this kind of stuff. Inside of here. And if I open this up, they can also— will have access to this Grad Party. And notice that here are my posts. Um, I'd like to go back and backtrack. Uh, here's some remaining tasks. Here's the OneNote brainstorm. And the other thing that's sort of cool about this, like I said, if I go under Files, I can see the Grad Party Checklist. There's another thing that I added in here. I'm going to go out and create a new tab because I want to show this to you, how you can get to this. One of the things that I could do— we're going to probably use the Excel to do this, but I wanted to show you that there's this really easy app that you can add into your tabs in Microsoft Teams called Tasks by Planner. And you just click on this and it becomes a new task planner tab that's inside of your tools. As you can see, Tasks by Planner and To Do. So these are, you know, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do, two of the other 365 ones that are in there, and I could create a new tab. Now I'm going to cancel out of this because I already did this, and I changed the name of the tab to Remaining Tasks. I just want to show you what, what would be possible here because this is pretty slick. What you can do is create a series of tasks related to the party, event, project that you're managing. Hold on. Right now it's grouped by bucket, but let me show you something here that's really slick. If you go under this, you have a lot of other ways that you could look at it. The one that I thought you might find really interesting was due date, because take a look at this, uh, late cleanup front landscaping, add mulch. Actually, I did that, so I could check that because I actually did that yesterday. But, uh, now the other ones that are coming up are ordering thank yous, building set lists for music, sending the thank yous. And, and all you need to do is if you want to add a task like Add a task this week. I could say send thank yous, and I'm going to change the due date though because it— you can't really send the thank yous till after the party. That's going to actually be out here around June 10th. And add task. All right. Oh, and notice this, that if I want, um, I can actually take this and I could assign the task right here. Which that'll go to my daughter. All right, so I hope this gives you a little feel for the possibility here, because when you think about this, you can utilize all of these tools together. And that's one of the really cool platform things about how they've built these cloud-based tools in Microsoft 365, you know, starting with OneNote for an initial by-yourself brainstorming making it a shared note to allow other team members to provide their input, taking the output of that and dropping it into Word or Excel, adding additional information when you do such, and then turning that into a share file document so that other people can create their inputs. Taking both of those, creating a new team in Microsoft Teams with a channel inside the team for the project event Workshop Party and, um, posting everything there. And the last thing that I'm going to probably do is once this is all done, I'm going to post all of our completed items and the budget and expenses into the wiki for this because this is our first high school graduate. Second one's coming up in a few more years. We're gonna have to replay this drill. And, um, the thing about it is why lose all of this effort? You know, we've already done the effort, we've already done the planning, we can do this again without losing all that thought and knowing what to expect when we walk into it. So I hope that you can see the— just the broad mix of possibilities here utilizing these tools, plus maybe some of the add-on tabs. I might do another video about the add-on tabs that you can get in the third-party tools that you can use from both Microsoft and the others. As a following video here. Make sure you check out my other YouTube videos on Microsoft Teams, including the one where I talk about how you can set up new teams and channels and tabs. I also did a second one about what I think is the best use of the wiki. What's the wiki? Yeah, watch that video. I'll put the links to both of those here at the bottom. And with that, if you'd like to find out a little bit more about me— hey, I'll cover up myself right here and make me Hi. What you can do is go out to my website, randalldean.com. I recommend you check out the programs tab and the e-learning tab if you have any interest in finding out about full-length, already-made video anytime training options for you. If you like these videos, please like, please subscribe, make some comments. And, you know, if you'd like to get a whole series of additional little tip sheets on Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft OneNote, Teams, and OneDrive, you know, 365, even Gmail and Google Suite, smartphone and tablet tips, how to reduce your distractions and work better from home, all of that, send me an email randy@randalldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll send you a whole bunch of tip sheets including even a cheat sheet to my YouTube channel. Awesome! Hope you had fun. Thanks. Bye now.