Quick Tips for Microsoft Outlook and Office 365 Users at the MSAE Annual Conference in Bay City

Let me tell you what I did. It says I'm recording. Uh, and what I did earlier in the session on Google, I recorded that one too. It's already out on my YouTube channel. So if you'd like some tips on Gmail, Google Workspace, it's already out there. And if this works, which fingers crossed, you'll be able to watch this again. Now, in the last session, it was funny. First came in, she goes, I wasn't sure I want to come to your session because I know you give so many tips. And I said, well, now I'm going to record it so you can watch it again and hit pause and rewind. So you— I can go your speed when you watch it at your leisure. Um, and one thing that I want to do with this session in particular is I want to make this a launch pad session. Let me show you what I mean. I should have mentioned this in my previous session, by the way, but one of the things that I did over the pandemic, I made my little passion project to build up my YouTube channel, which is rapidly approaching 5,000 subscribers now. Because what I've done is I filled it up mostly with 3 to 10 minute little tip videos. Now let me show you something here. I'm saying Launchpad session because what I'm hoping is when you come out of today's session, you can use this viewing guide to the channel plus some of the other content I've added and go build your own self-study program. And I'm going to make sure they get this document posted out on the conference website. Okay, so you can just go grab this PDF and these links are live. So you click this link from the PDF, you'll go right to the videos that you can dive into and take a look. Notice I've got videos specifically for Outlook users, uh, quite a few on even things like calendar and task management, Outlook search, etc., setting up your folders, Gmail and Google videos. Uh, take a look at this, just general email strategy videos. Who's got a messy inbox? Deep dive tutorial on how to clean it up and even how to set up the folders in that inbox. And if you take a look at page 2, I've even got stuff on OneNote, OneDrive, and Teams, as well as even Zoom. So you can go out and pick up a lot of extra stuff. And how many of you are clutter hounds? Stacks and piles, paper. I've even got about a 20-minute tutorial on how to clean up your stacks and piles. Efficiently and effectively. So dive in. But like I said, I'll make sure this gets posted out on the site because I want to go back to the PowerPoint. Sort of an interesting thing here, by the way, PowerPoint tip. You want to immediately jump into your PowerPoint on whatever slide you're on when you're in management mode, do a Shift-Function-F5 on your Windows keyboard. Boom. Then you're in. Hey, that's cool. And here's the thing. What PowerPoint! I've got less than 30 minutes. I've now got 25 minutes, so I'm going to do this. This is gonna— this is out on the conference site. It is the one-page document of what I'm planning to cover here today. But remember, you've got hours of potential training depending on what you want to dive into if you use that YouTube guide. So what I want you to do is use this, like I said, as your launch pad session. Now, um, one quick question. I want to get a feel for what people are using. Microsoft Outlook downloaded version on your computer. Who's using the Outlook on their computer? Who's using web Outlook? Who's not sure what the difference is between the two? All right, let me show you something here. This is the full download version of Microsoft Outlook. This Let me see, right here is the Web Outlook. See how they look and feel very different? This is basically sort of like a browser tool that Microsoft has built and installed. And you can see and do email, you can see your calendar, you can get to your contacts, you can get to your task list. But the one thing that's interesting about this is it is technically a stripped-down version of Microsoft Outlook, designed to use more like as a web tool than as a fully deep and intensive software productivity tool. This is great for quick and easy stuff. However, if you want to get the full set of tools, what I strongly recommend is you instead use the full download version. This used to be called Outlook 2013, Outlook 2016. Now it's called the local client version. And how did I get this on here? Well, let me ask you this. Everybody here using 365 as your backend? Anybody not, not using 365? Okay, here's what you need to know. You've got access to a whole set of your tools right here. See this little thing right here? That's your Office launcher. And if you click on Office, this launches your entire tool set from Microsoft that's available under your subscription with Microsoft. And so what'll happen is when you load this up and go full page, notice that down the side— first it's going to show you the documents and files that you had just recently used, but down the side you'll see your listing of some of your key apps. But if you click on this right down here, this little Apps panel, and double-click on it— let's try to double-click— giving me the— let me do the More Apps. There we go. They just changed that, I think. This is a listing of everything that's available under your subscription. You might have slightly different choices than I do too, depending on the level of subscription. Like the one thing That you'll notice I don't have on here SharePoint because I'm a single user. SharePoint was— is designed for multi-person use, so it doesn't really make sense to pay for it if you're a single user. However, this is where you've got a whole set of your newer tools that are now available as part of your Office 365, including things like Teams. However, let me show you something. Right there is a button you want to know. That is your Install Office button, and most importantly, what that does is it allows you to install not only this full version of Microsoft Outlook but also Word, Excel, and PowerPoint full versions. You're not using the web tools, you're using the full download versions of those tools on your primary PC. Strongly recommend this is what you use as your primary and your primary workstation However, you can absolutely use that web tool if you're just doing something quick and easy. Now we're going to talk about that more in a minute, but what I want to do is come back and share something here with you because these tools allow you to do a lot more than you used to do. Basically, you've got tools like OneDrive and OneNote where I've actually built— I think I have about a 30-minute tutorial on that YouTube sheet all about how to set up and use your OneDrive better. I have another probably about 40-minute tutorial out on my YouTube page on a deep dive of how you can use OneNote not only for getting all of your personal notes and ideas organized, but how you can then use that as a launchpad for sharing and collaboration, because OneNote is built as a sharing and collaboration tool. Let me show you what I mean by this. I'm going to go back down in here and I'm going to launch the OneNote app. On my screen. Now, it's sort of funny. I have a funny little thing about Microsoft. How many of you ever been out to Seattle? Done a trip out there? And you ever driven on the highway up through Bellevue and Redmond around Seattle? You know, they got that pretty lake that's north of the city where I think a lot of the Microsoft execs live, and then behind it's Bellevue and Redmond. And if you drive through Bellevue and Redmond, big shiny silver-looking buildings, Microsoft upper corner. And I'm pretty sure somewhere in one of those buildings is the Department of Not Intuitive. This doesn't seem like sometimes— why'd they do it that way? Here's one of them. I'm going to show you one of them right here. Notice the way they've designed OneNote. You have top-level notebooks, okay? And you can create additional notebooks. Now, you know what this thing's like? It's like Trapper— it's like an electronic Trapper Keeper. You remember the Trapper Keepers? They, you know, the rage that your kids all wanted to have. And you can build individual notebooks in your Microsoft Trapper Keeper. And then inside any of these notebooks, you can open it up and add sections. These would be the binder tabs. So you got the big tabs, and now you've got the mini tabs. Okay, and then notice that here's one that I made for myself and my wife and my family. Including vacations. Now here's where I think it's not intuitive, and you tell me I'm wrong. So you've got the big notebooks, the binder tabs. In an app called OneNote, you add a page. Shouldn't it be a note? I think it should be a note. I think that should be note— add note, not add page. Add note. Now I see what they're doing. It's Pages of the Notebook. I get it, but you got to think about it a minute. I think it should be called— no, that's just me. Um, but notice down here. Now this is cool. This just gives you an example of some of the capabilities. So I made this notebook that I wanted to intentionally share with my wife and daughters. I made this tab for vacation ideas. Under here I have vacation ideas. Look at everything I can do in here. What I did is I put down a listing of possible vacations I downloaded these web pictures. That's Banff and Lake Louise. That's Kauai. And I'm pretty sure that's Lake Louise right there. That's Yosemite. I'm sorry, I got that backwards. And, um, I don't have the— I've never been there because what I did is instead I inserted pictures from online. It's pretty cool. And I even found this Tripomatic free city guide of all the things you're supposed to do next time you go to Paris. Wait a minute, look at this right here. Share. And I've set up this file to be shared with my wife and my two daughters so they can add their stuff in too. Be careful what you wish for, because that's why my kid jumped in here with the little pen tool and said hi. So I wrote hi back, right? But now I just want you to think about this. This is where Microsoft has done something pretty unique, not just with OneNote They're doing the same thing in OneDrive and in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Outlook is designed as a beautifully designed manage yourself tool. Manage your email, manage your calendar, manage your task list, manage your contacts, but it's you. It's not really good at working across multiple people. You can do it, but it's clunky. It wasn't built for that. Then the cloud came, and when the cloud came, it changed everything because now you've got your stuff sort of stored in a general place out on the web owned and controlled by Microsoft's tech team, where not only can you get to your stuff, but you can get to your other coworkers' stuff too. And so OneNote, OneDrive, and Teams have all built sharing capabilities. So like a good example, Docs— Google has their Docs, Sheets, and Slides, which is the comparable to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can do some of the stuff in Google too, by the way. But now what you can do is in OneDrive, you can mill— put a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint and then make it a shared document or file so that other people on your team can get into that same document or file and make editing changes and collaborate real time. Now wait, let's go one level deeper. Let's say you're both working on a Word document together with sharing, and then on screen number 2, you open up your Microsoft Teams because you're both working remotely a couple days a week, and you have that person that you're working with remotely in the same document as you while you're doing a video meeting with that same person and you're talking about the editing changes live. That's what these tools do. Now, when I drove under the hood and I saw what Microsoft was building here during early in the pandemic, I was like, this is game breaker, this is different. But let me show you what else is even more game breaker. This blew me away when I saw this. Let me close this. And now what I'm going to do is launch my Microsoft Teams real quick. Well, it won't be real quick. It takes a minute for Teams to load up. Um, but as we're waiting for this, let's see, is it even going to load? We'll try one more time. I'm trying to double-click. Here we go. So we'll give it a second to load. By the way, while it's loading, let me tell you that Teams actually has a remarkably similar structure to OneNote. I'm not even sure it's going to load right now. Let's try this button. There it goes. It's coming. All right. So as this loads up, because what I want to show you— I thought this was truly game breaker. How many of you are using some third-party tools besides Microsoft? Anybody got a CRM tool like Zoho or Salesforce? What about a project management tool like Asana or Monday or Trello? Any of you using something like that? Let's see. Well, it looks like it's going to be clunky with me. So it's in— look at this. Arthur C. Clarke has a famous quote. You remember Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction writer from '60s and '70s? He had a famous quote, said, "Technology is nothing short of magic." And I would like to add a line, "When it works." Yeah, so it looks like I'm caught in the Teams hangup, so I'm not going to do this. But the thing that I wanted to show you is that when you're in Teams, you can build a team, you can build project tabs within the team, and you can add tabs. And it was in the add tabs area— I want you to listen closely— you can add a tab searching for tools. Now it's going to bring up quite a few Microsoft tools, but guess what else it's going to bring up? You could type in Asana, you could type in Trello, you can type in Salesforce, you can type in Zoho, and you can actually use those tools inside your Open Teams at the same time. And that was groundbreaking when I saw that. The reason that I consider that groundbreaking is because, um, basically if you think about it, before that Microsoft said you can use whatever software you want as long as it's Microsoft. Remember the old Ford Motor thing? You can have any color you want as long as it's black. Remember the Model T thing, right? Well, this is Microsoft. You can use whatever you want as long as Microsoft Sai Nadella took over as CEO looking at the structure of the cloud and realizing that people that are using these tools have tools they really like from other vendors, and they set it up so it works. So it's, it's quite a thing to take a look at. So now let's go back to this though, because I wanted to sort of show you this. Now let's get into some basic structure. All right, basic structure, Microsoft Outlook. Here's basic structure: email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes. If you've been using Outlook for a while, that's the tools you've been using for years and years. Now I want to show you something. See these little three dots down here at the bottom? Wherever you see something like that in any of these tools, click and see what's hiding there, because that's where some of the goodies are. Navigation options. Turn off compact navigation, hit OK. Now you can see them in Word form. Remember how it used to be Word form like 10 years ago? It's still there. You can still have it set up that way if you'd like. And now you've got your basic set of tools plus OneNote, plus OneDrive, plus Teams, plus Word, Excel, PowerPoint, plus some of the other newer tools, SharePoint and others that you can get into and use for enhanced individual productivity and focus, but also group and team productivity and focus. Now, since my little display thing didn't work here, let me show you a little something. I'm going to go back into the YouTube guide. If I come down here under OneNote, OneDrive, Teams, uh, let me see. Actually, you know what, I'm not sure I put it on here. I might have to add it to this. I have a video out on my YouTube channel where I actually talk about how I used, in this order, OneNote on my smartphone in my daughter's dance studio parking lot, waiting for her to get out of dance, to plan my other daughter's high school graduation party brainstorm, which was then opened into a share note with my wife and daughters to make their comments on my brainstorm. Which I then copied and pasted into Excel, which I then shared with, once again, my daughters. They could change the order of the tasks of this big project to get them in the right order and add in their comments too, which I then added columns not only for the task, owner, due date, budget, which I then brought into Microsoft Teams under the project to make it a universal place where we could all get our stuff and leave each other notes for a personal graduation party. I'm not sharing that with you because of the graduation party. How many of you are meeting and event planners or people related to stuff? That's the kind of thing you can do right now with this suite and set of tools. Okay, you can set it up so that you can build and execute multi-person, multi-step project activity event plans utilizing the suite of tools, doing it whatever way is going to make your work group most effective and efficient. It's really cool. So that video, go watch for it because it says a very personal example of how I use all these tools across the different platform. It's like 10-15 minutes and it will walk you through, but it'll hopefully give you a whole slew of ideas on how you can do this kind of stuff. Now wait a minute, let's talk about something here. We don't have a ton of time, but you know what, I want to— I'm going to jump out to one of my other presentations. Um, who remembers these? There's your PalmPilot. Yeah, you remember your PalmPilot? And how many of you loved your Palm? Oh, it was so easy to use. Well, it wasn't really that easy to use, but it was so simple. Because if you remember the structure of the Palm Pilot, it had 4 basic buttons: calendar, contacts, tasks, notes. That sounds familiar. Remember, email, calendar, contacts, task notes. And if you remember, these did synchronize with your Microsoft Outlook tool back then. Let me show you something here. I'm going to jump forward a little bit. Take a look at this thing. It's called the center productivity panel. Why do I call it center productivity panel? Real simple. You know how most of these devices, you can have 4 or 5 home screens and go through that way, a few this way? If you had 5 screens set up, I want this to be panel number 3, dead in the middle, because that means no matter where you're at on the device, you're 1 or 2 swipes from your Satter Power Tools. Now let me show you a little something on, on this panel. Now those of you that were here earlier going, oh no, he's repeating it, but wait a minute. I'm going in a different place right now. Watch this. Right there is your Outlook app. Now we've already talked about 365, full download on your computer and the web version synchronized through your Outlook.com account address. So it synchronizes across the devices. This one app gives you access to that email, your calendar,. And if you use the little magnifying glass in between email and calendar icons in the Open app, your full contact database. Now, if you set up the task list in Outlook, which I have a number of tutorial videos on how to use that better, you can get the Microsoft To Do— make sure it's by Microsoft because there's a couple to-do apps out there— Microsoft To Do. That will allow you to synchronize your task list in Outlook to your phone and vice versa. And if I'm not mistaken, I think they've got that To Do app also working with the new Planner app in 365, which you could then potentially see in your Microsoft Teams. But wait, there's more! There's the OneNote app for all your notes. Now hold on a second, hold on a second. This is where things get a little, a little hazy. For years and years, the Notes app in your Microsoft Outlook— by the way, I have a whole set of ideas on how you can use this— the notes in here would synchronize with first the Palm Pilots and then the BlackBerrys. But then for a few years, what came after BlackBerry sort of took them out of business? Remember what was right after BlackBerry and Black— caused BlackBerry a lot of problems? Fairly popular device. Thank you. Yeah, iPhone and Android came out, and I called those the lost years in the wilderness for Microsoft because that was before 365, and now you couldn't get everything to move over to your phone anymore. Aggravating. Well, it took me a while to figure it out. Microsoft To Do, now you got your task list. We already talked about the Outlook app. It's, you know, email, calendar, contacts. A little sneaky something here for you. You built a notepad in your Microsoft Outlook, which you could, although I'd probably say OneNote might be better if it's anything you'd be sharing with. How many of you have found this little thing right here? Anybody using the sticky notes that's now available as standard in your Windows PC? It's a standard thing, and if it's not up here in your productivity panel Just go down here under the letter S. There's your sticky notes. I want to show you something. Let's take a look at some of the notes I built in here. One, I have my priority note that I build every year to help me with figuring out what it is that I want to work on that year, both in terms of goals and projects, clients, activities, events, including subprojects, as well as my people. Try to review it at least once a week, make sure I have items from that in my calendar and/or task list. So I'm always moving forward. Cool. Wait a minute. I also have inside of here. Let's take a look at this. There's my bucket list. I call it the possibilities list, but I got my bucket list. You know, the movie, Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman. And then if you go down a little further, I've also even got lists for like grocery store, home supply store, office supply store, music store, bookstore, ideas for my next episode of my e-newsletter. Here's some of my travel notes. Notes, you know, 800 numbers for the major hotels, airlines, car rental companies, even packing lists for regular trips, business trips, trips where I'm doing a presentation, even how to pack for a good camping trip. Yay. I also have notes in here, although I think I would move this one to OneNote now because of the sharing capabilities, for my next upcoming staff meeting where I keep ideas of what it is I need to cover for agenda items in the next staff meeting. But do you see why you might want to make that a share notes? You can have other people in the meeting be able to add their items too. And if you're doing that, why not have notes for all the individual people you're working with where you just write down the ideas of what it is you need to talk to them about next, so you never forget what you need to talk about? See, these are some of the kinds of things you can do inside this notepad. Now you're probably going, where's he going with this? Well, let me show you where I'm going with this. The Sticky Note app. I have never added anything into this. Let me click and open this. Hopefully this one will open. Loading sticky notes. Wait a minute, you're in Checklist, Full Swing, Camping Trip, Bucket List. Wait a minute, Priorities, Intern. Didn't I just show you some of those? What the Sticky Note app did when I first opened it, it went and checked my Microsoft Outlook and it realized I had notes built and it pulled them in. Now wait, this gets cool. You won't see it in the OneNote tools on your, on your computer because it knows you've got your sticky notes here. But if you open the OneNote app on your device, you will see the little N icon in one corner and the sticky note icon in the other corner. And if you click on that sticky note, there's where all your Outlook notes are. They are synced now. They're all put together across the devices. And so in essence, what they've done is they've made it so that you can have seamless productivity wherever and whenever you're at. Now, what I do in my normal longer sessions on these topics is I then start deep diving some of the techniques on how you can be much more efficient using your email in Outlook and using and setting up the task list, etc. You've got access to a lot of that. I'll make sure they get this out here because you can actually sort of self-study some of these tools right here. That's why I didn't want to deep dive into this, because I knew you could go do this on your own after the fact, sort of making your own self-study program coming out of here today. What I wanted to do was show you the overriding structure of what's possible here so that you know how to set up and use these tools. But now let's finish with one little thing. I want to go back to that productivity panel. Email, calendar, contacts synchronized from both your full download Outlook as well as visible on your web Outlook. To Do, giving you your task list from Outlook. OneNote now through the sticky notes, giving you access to your notes in Outlook, but also any notes that you built for sharing and collaboration using OneNote proper. Also got my Microsoft Teams hiding up here too, where I could do my Teams management as well as even open a Teams meeting. Okay, wait a minute, there's more. I got my telephone, I got my voicemail, I got my text messaging. I've also got my Google suite of tools. I've also got OneDrive. That's where all my documents and files are. Now notice Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps are not on the screen because guess what? They are on the phone in the background. Because if I open that OneDrive app and then I click on anything that's in there that's a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, guess what it launches? Word, Excel, or PowerPoint on the device. Although, a little side note, you're doing spreadsheets, not on one of these. Get a tablet. You know, if you're going to do spreadsheet work, get a tablet because these are not built for spreadsheets. Okay, but now wait a second. I've also got access to all of my other documents and files right here, and I can even do sharing in here. I took the standard calculator app and put it on this panel too because you would be shocked. I bet you use that 3, 4, 5 times a day, just the calculator. And I've even got a fax machine app. And now wait a second, oh, look at this one right here, Office Lens. Who's got the Office Lens app? This is by Microsoft, and you don't even need to have 365 to get it. It's free. But listen to what this little gem of a, of a app can do for you. You got a hard copy document in your hand out in the field. You pull up the Office Lens app, it brings up your, your camera. You hold it over the document, it'll make a sizing box of the document that it sees in the camera. You hit the commit button, takes the picture, and then allows you to automatically convert and save that picture of that document that you just took into a workable PDF file and saves it to your OneDrive. Wait a minute, that means your phone is now a scanning and PDF creation utility too. What is this panel right here? What is that? It's not, it's not a smartphone. What is that? It's— yes, it's an office. It's not even a computer, it's a full 1991 top-of-the-line office. There's your phone, there's your multi-line voicemail with— you push the buttons for— there's your day planner wall calendar with your marker, there's your Rolodex, there's your little handwritten task list, there's your 10-key, there's your fax machine and scanner. And you can just get out and start using it wherever you're at, whenever you're at. And if you had this plus a tablet configured with everything I just described here, do you need a laptop? Maybe not. I'm just gonna say maybe not. Now, if you're doing heavy lifting work in heavy lifting pieces of software that work better and more efficiently on a fully fledged laptop or desktop computer, yeah, yeah. Then maybe you want it. But boy, I'll tell you what, I bet you there's a whole lot of people that could do almost everything on this one panel of their phone. I'm already out of time. All right, see, I told you I was going to give you way too much to think about and soak in. But like I said, use this as your launch pad session and then go out to the conference site. I'll make sure they get this file posted to the conference site If it's not today or tomorrow, it will be in the next couple of days. Watch the conference site for both of my sessions, Google and this one. This file will be there and you can go do your own self-study to take it one step further beyond this. Good luck, have fun. These tools are awesome. Hope you had fun. Thanks. All right, and I'm going to stop the share now and stop the recording.