Randy Dean's New Mastering Microsoft 365 Series Preview Video: Outlook, OneNote, Teams, Copilot etc.

Hi everybody, I'm Randy Dean, popularly known as the Email Sanity Expert and also the author of the recent Amazon bestseller, Taming the Email Beast. Um, I wanted to ask a question. Uh, do you use Microsoft 365 and are you feeling overwhelmed simply by the sheer amount of new apps and programs that Microsoft has been releasing as part of the 365 suite and put at your disposal. There's been so many apps and so many tools released to us in such a short time. Many of them can be really helpful, greatly increase not only your personal productivity but also your team's coordination and collaboration on projects, activities, and events. But who has the time to figure out how to use all these This video learning system will get you there. Here's what you're going to learn. First, you're going to learn what they do. Each of those different programs: OneNote, OneDrive, Teams, of course, Microsoft Outlook. We're going to talk about Planner and To Do, a little bit about SharePoint and Loop. And you're going to learn what these programs do as well as how they can help you be more productive, focused, organized, and less distracted. You can also see how they can help your team be more coordinated and collaborative and how they all work together. It's truly a revolutionary architecture that Microsoft has put together here, a revolutionary collection of programs really designed to enhance personal and team productivity. Let's take a quick look at the structure of the 365 suite. Of course, Microsoft Outlook, which is your email, your calendar, your contacts, and if you use them, your tasks. I have been teaching Outlook for 20+ years. I found that a lot of people are underutilizing the task capabilities in Outlook, uh, but they're quite good. And if you are still using classic Outlook, you probably still have a very simple notepad at your disposal. But all of you that are using the new and web versions of Outlook They're now expecting you to use the OneNote app instead. Outlook was really designed for your productivity, and initially it was created at a time when truly collaborative cloud-based tools were just a dream in some programmer's mind. Thus, sharing capabilities are very limited and cursory. Many organizations figured out how to get calendar shared between people as needed, and you could send task requests and contact exports via email, but the sharing was really limited. Microsoft's cloud efforts really began in about 2010 with the release of OneDrive. Yep, OneDrive has been around for 15 years now, but the true capabilities have just in the last few years really taken off with the other tools in the former Office 365 suite, now called Microsoft 365. OneDrive will act as your online dual redundancy e-document media file cabinet, but it will also give you the ability to share and collaborate with others on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, as well as share other types of files like PDFs and media files with other approved users. It is actually the little brother to SharePoint, which has actually been around a bit longer. SharePoint actually launched all the way back in 2001, but not as a cloud service per se, but as the shared intranet and storage platform for many organizations using Microsoft on Exchange. Things really, uh, started changing with SharePoint in about 2011 when Office 365 was finally launched. Now it could also be used like the community file cabinet for of the organization. The perfect place for company files like policy manuals, crisis plans, benefit plan documents, and more. It also has capabilities for building a company intranet, not internet, intranet. Think for things like new employee onboarding, the company community calendar, perhaps some collaborative project management applications, and the host location for new tools in 365 that we're about to come online. So you have OneDrive for your documents, files, and media, and SharePoint as your community file cabinet and intranet. Now, the OneNote app is nearly as old as SharePoint, announced in 2002 and made available on a limited basis in 2003, but it really didn't do much for about a decade. Then, after Office 365 was released, it started taking off a bit, although mostly as a personal notepad more than a collaborative tool. It is far more than just a little notepad, though. It can be a very powerful collaborative tool for supervisors and their direct reports, as well as workgroups and teams with the ability to attach and insert documents and files, photos, audio and video, and more. With some creativity, it can even greatly reduce internal emails while enhancing real-time project team and individual collaboration and coordination. Going even beyond that is Microsoft Teams, a potential super tool for team collaboration and productivity, which became widely available in 2017. Now you have not only a platform for team chat and audio and video meetings, but also an evolving platform for the creation of work group and project teams that can allow a one-stop shop for everything related to a specific project activity, or event. One of the very cool features within these Teams is the ability to even access other Microsoft tools and apps, from Word to Excel to OneNote, to even third-party tools like Asana, Trello, Salesforce. Yes, with the launch of Teams, Microsoft finally realized that some organizations actually use certain third-party tools that they prefer, and Teams allowed for this to be able to use Teams as their centralized hub for all things related to that project, client, or activity. One tool that is rapidly increasing in popularity due to its seamless integration with Teams is Microsoft Planner, which will actually take the place of Microsoft Project's web version starting in 2025. Planner has been around since 2018, but has greatly increased in popularity in the last couple of years as it became the bridge for individual and team tasks from Outlook all the way over to Teams, coordinating with Microsoft To Do. Now you have the ability to see project and task plans with several different views, share and assign tasks, and see your To Do interface in your Outlook. And you can share your plans within Planner with other team members to enhance coordination. It is actually now the default task manager when you create a team within Teams. And now one of the newest tools in the suite, Loop, provides the opportunity to create unified workspaces for all members of a team to brainstorm, plan, and collaborate in real time. And yes, Loop is one of those Microsoft tools that is also available to open inside of your Microsoft Teams. So consider this evolving set of tools and apps: Outlook for your email, calendar, tasks, and contacts; OneDrive for your cloud-redundant document and file storage with sharing capabilities; SharePoint for your organization's shared files and information, as well as possibly your company intranet; and OneNote, which is far more than just a little note app. Yes, it can help you get more organized and store and save ideas and lists, like any other note app, but it also has the capabilities to be used as a potential tool for enhanced supervisor and employee communication, collaboration, and coordination, as well as enhanced project, team, and event management and coordination. And then you can take that even one step higher with Microsoft Teams for fully integrated team meetings, chat, shared notes and plans, document documents, files, tasks, and projects via Planner and To Do, and fully integrated team workspaces in Loop. And of course, now you also may have access to Microsoft Copilot, either the free version through your browser or the Pro version that integrates with many of these tools, as well as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to possibly save you time in so many ways. So now that you understand the structure of what I consider the 365 powerful personal and professional productivity suite— say that 3 times fast— let's talk about what these individual programs in my Microsoft Mastery video series will cover. Microsoft Outlook. Yes, you've probably been using it for years, some of you for decades. You've been using it smartly. I found out over these last 20+ years from speaking in front of thousands at major conferences and conventions and nearly all professional sectors, from education to engineering to travel and tourism, almost no one gets training on how to use this essential productivity staple. How many of you have taken a strategic and technical course on more effective email management using your Outlook? I'll tell you that from my experience being up on stage in front of all of these different audiences for the last couple decades, it's less than 5% typically when it's an audience that hasn't heard me speak before. And when you couple that with the fact that if you use Outlook, you're probably spending 2 or more hours every day using it, especially if you're an office-based or hybrid working professional, and you're also very likely not only spending 2 hours a day using it, but you're also likely getting greatly distracted by it. So we start the program series here in Program 1, Taming the Email Beast: The Problem and the Process. In this program, we're going to discuss why better email management and efficiency skills are so important for your professional success. I personally believe this is one of the lowest hanging fruits out there for working professionals to enhance their time and productivity management. So many of these working professionals are both flooded and distracted by their inbox, and because they are self-taught, they are making a lot of very simple mistakes, mistakes that cost them time, organization, and enhance their distraction. Which often leads to stress and overwhelm. In this program, you're going to learn a new triage strategy for better real-time email management, keeping your quick stuff moving, identifying and prioritizing your more important and involved items, filing finished items in a way that you can find them again later, and clearing out that inbox far more regularly. This flies in the face of the fact that the average professional email user is looking at each and every email 3 to 7 times before taking a smart and appropriate action. I'm pretty certain I figured out why you're doing that, and I think I can show you how to fix that once and for all. And I'll just ask you this: how much time could you get back in a year if you went from looking at each and every email 3 to 7 times down to once, maybe twice max. And not only will you greatly reduce unnecessary touches, you'll actually be able to better identify your truly important or urgent items. And these strategies will help you not just with your email, but all of your other workplace input streams. Things like text messages, voicemail, phone calls, Documents and e-documents, all that stuff you will be able to manage better simply by taking this program. We'll also talk about how to deal with your email and other inputs when you are dealing with a crisis. Oh no, another fire is burning. You'll learn how to seamlessly move from focused productivity mode to urgent crisis mode and back. Because how many of you have crises du jour? You know, your multiple little fires every day. This system is built to help you manage this daily, balancing efficiency and urgency in a seamless and repeatable system, and that will reduce stress and overwhelm. You'll also learn several valuable and immediately usable technical tips in both classic Outlook and new and web Outlook that make this system easy and far better than an inbox with hundreds or even thousands of messages. Many unread, with many flagged for later review. We'll show you how to get that inbox clean, maybe even all the way to zero, and keep it clean. And you'll learn a few different strategies for filing your messages, labeling your messages, and making your search easy so you can find what you've put away when you need to use it later. This will give you the confidence to actually put those things away and finally see a clear screen once in a while. May not solve world hunger, but it sure feels good when you see that inbox down to almost at zero. And then in the Taming the Email Beast Part 2 program, we're going to talk about reducing distraction and enabling automation. In my live programs, I talk about how email is basically just a bunch of hungry squirrels with that occasional big angry dog. And how it has morphed from being a super powerful productivity tool— that's what it was designed for— into perhaps being one of your biggest distractions and nuisances. But we all know email isn't going away anytime soon, so the more effective and efficient you get with handling it and better at reducing the distraction from it, the more time you'll get back to put your focus on your most important projects, tasks, and people. We'll teach you how to take what you've learned in program 1 and apply it to both better identify when messages from the most important people come in, as well as use key automated settings to greatly reduce the junk, spam, and spoofing and phishing messages that keep coming in and driving you crazy. The key goal here, to know when your most important people and messages are coming in while reducing the impact of all of the other stuff that often causes distraction. Squirrel! We're also going to dive into several automations that can save you a bunch of time. Automated template-style email responses, auto-filing of your messages, getting automated summaries of received messages. And if you're a Copilot user, even how to use some of the new AI tools to maybe help you even compose or improve some of your messages. After taking these first two programs, you'll understand why many clients have found significant time savings for their staff. One of my university clients even found that the average attendee of my program was saving more than 2 hours per week. That's per person, just using these new email strategies and tips in their Outlook. With some of my attendees reporting saving nearly that much every single workday. And once we get past the nitty-gritty of your Outlook email, we will then in program 3, Using Outlook for Better Time, Project, and People Management, we're going to show you how the combination of tools, especially calendar, tasks, and contacts, when set up properly, can make you far better at identifying your priorities, planning your time more strategically, and knocking out quite a bit more on your projects and tasks every single day. You will learn upfront a key mistake you are likely making right at the start of the day, which often then sends you down the path of stress and distraction, and will help to change your focus so you can get your day started on a better and more productive path. You'll learn not only how to work your day, but we'll also discuss how to see the bigger picture at least once a week and how to create and modify the bigger picture plans that you have at least once or twice a year. And then we'll get down to brass tacks and show you how to incorporate that bigger picture of your key goals, projects, activities, people, and tasks into your day-to-day actions and activities. Thus, you're going to finally be putting your time and effort into the things that matter most rather than simply constantly staring at all of those emails coming in. And you'll learn some very useful technical tips inside of the Outlook calendar, the tasks in Microsoft To Do, and even some options for using and managing notes and contacts in your Microsoft Outlook. You'll also see how all of these capabilities can be seamlessly shared with your phone and tablet devices and remote workstations. This 3-video miniseries will make you a far more efficient, more strategic, and significantly less distracted user of Microsoft Outlook using either the classic or newer web versions. You'll learn not only how to save time on your daily Outlook-related activities, activities and actions, but also how to use that time better. If you simply want to greatly improve your usage of your Microsoft Outlook, this 3-video miniseries is available as its own set. But the set of 3 videos also acts as the introductory 3 videos of the more expansive full set of the Mastering Microsoft 365 video series. In video 4, we're going to dive into OneDrive, your online personal multi-redundant sharing-capable file cabinet. And we'll also discuss a bit on SharePoint, which is more of your organization's community shared storage. You'll understand what is saved where and why. And learn strategies for better organizing, managing, and finding your files when needed. You'll find out how to restore previous versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents if accidentally overwritten, and also when you might want to still consider doing a remote or third-party backup of your files, as well as why I strongly believe you should turn on your autosave. You will see and learn how easy it is to share files with those both within and external to your organization, and how you can manage your access with read-only and editing privileges, password protection, and even do real-time multi-person collaboration on documents. You'll learn the difference between your onboard File Explorer versus your browser-based web access and some key benefits of each when it comes to accessing your files. Then, after understanding the file management backend, we'll dive into Microsoft OneNote in video 5. As I've said multiple times, this is so much more than a simple note-taking app. It can be your and your team's platform for better communication, collaboration, and coordination. We'll show you ideas on how you can better work with your project, group, and department teams, share document and spreadsheet files, PDFs, post photos, audio, and video files, and add content from the internet. And so much more. You'll better understand the 3-tier structure of OneNote, how sharing works within the app, including a couple privacy watchouts that are pretty important, and how it could even potentially become your team's primary interface for updates, meeting information, and more. You'll also learn some personal uses, as well as when it might be smarter to consider an outside note app like Google Keep or Apple Notes, and you'll see how to make your note information easily accessible across all of your devices. The amount of potential productivity, creativity, and organization you'll gain from this one video cannot be underestimated. And then in videos 6 and 7, we're gonna dive into Microsoft Teams. We start right up front with the nuts and bolts of how to use the video meetings tool and chat, including less used tools inside your video meetings like the whiteboard. You'll learn and understand how to create and send invites, how to start an instant meeting, how to adjust your volume and picture settings, use backdrops, share files within a live meeting, and you'll even pick up a few good virtual meeting best practices to make your Teams meetings simply work better. We'll then spend some time comparing the structure of OneNote to the structure of Teams within Teams. They actually are somewhat similar, and you can potentially build new teams for your key projects, workgroups, activities, and events. You'll see and learn how to open documents, spreadsheets, and presentations inside of Teams, build shared task lists within Planner, and even learn a bit about how to integrate other 365 apps as well as and even some very popular third-party apps within your Teams. You'll see how this frankly amazing but frequently underutilized program can enhance your project team or workgroup team's project planning, coordination, and collaboration, and also be your one-stop shop for all things project or team related for all members of that team. We'll even talk a little bit about Planner and Loop and how these two 365 Drive tools in conjunction with Teams can create a seamless workspace for better team planning and project execution. Then in video number 8, we're going to go much deeper into Planner and To Do and show how this very cool project and task planning app can help you plan more quickly and strategically, see the bigger picture more easily, identify and assign tasks within the team, and provide additional details and information when necessary. You'll see the Project Task Bridge between Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook so that your more time-sensitive tasks and deadlines don't get missed. And you'll also see and learn how to set up multi-stage plans, how to back up your completed plans for reuse later, and some quick tips for improving your projects planning and plan creation over time. And then to complete the series, in video In video number 9, we'll dive into Microsoft Copilot. That's Microsoft's powerful new artificial intelligence assistant. We'll show you how it can help you in so many ways, from email and document creation to useful and fast summaries to help with research, image creation, and enhancing and improving your project plans, employee feedback, and customer response. You'll learn how to prompt and re-prompt and re-prompt again so you can quickly have your Copilot AI assistant generate the kinds of outputs, solutions, research, or summaries just the way that you need them. Once you understand how Copilot and the other AI tools work, your plans should be formulated more quickly and easily with better accuracy. Your information overload should become quite a bit more manageable, and And frankly, you should never ever suffer from writer's block ever again, be that in an email, a document, or even a presentation. You'll also learn a couple extremely valuable watchouts about using these AI tools, as well as best practices with these new and powerful tools so you don't run into some of the common problems. Now, of course, if you purchase the entire series, which has basically 10 videos if you count this one, you can pick and choose which content you'd like to dive into first. You don't have to necessarily follow the prescribed 9-video order as I just listed above. If you think the Copilot information is both of most interest and most useful, dive into that first. If you think you're pretty good at Outlook but could really benefit from the OneNote or OneDrive information, get into that. Regardless of how you go through this content know a couple of things. Throughout, I'll be prompting you when I would recommend you stop the video and practice the new skill being featured. I'll do this in all of the videos in the series following this initial series overview video. I'm also going to be providing valuable summaries for each of the videos, actually somewhat created with the help of Copilot AI, that will help stress the key points that you're going to be learning from the individual programs, and I will also be providing video updates, almost like a new software version update, pretty regularly when I see changes to the user interface in any of these 365 programs. I purposely built this video series in a component structure to allow me to do regular updates when Microsoft changes the software which, as you know, has been quite frequent as of late. As a purchaser of an individual video in this series, the Microsoft Outlook Mini 3 video series, or the full 10-video program series, you're going to get appropriate regular updates according to your purchase. Finally, I will be notifying you when I have related bonus content, either either on my YouTube channel or in other formats so you can stay current and keep expanding your skills over time. This series is intended to be a living, changing, evolving series, your personal real-time Microsoft mastery system. And I may eventually add new components to the series. I will definitely be updating existing videos within the series as changes occur. And I will also be creating additional supplemental content to enhance the series. And if you purchase in whole or part, you will benefit moving forward. Think of this as basically a lifetime membership, or at least until I finally decide to retire, which won't be anytime soon. My youngest starts college this fall. I do request that you not share the following components videos in this series with non-purchasers, but you can share this particular first video, this preview video of the Microsoft Mastery Series, sort of an overview video. I'm going to put this one on my YouTube channel also so that my YouTube followers can understand what it is that I'm doing here. So please feel free to share this video with others that you believe may benefit from the series. So they can consider whether they may also want to participate in the bigger and more in-depth set of programs. So now that you know what to expect, it's time to dig in and get more productive, more efficient, more organized, more focused, and less distracted with all things Microsoft. Dive into video number 1 on taming the email beast right now, or whatever video you have available that you feel will bring most benefit. And if you haven't purchased this series yet, I recommend you do that now and get rolling. Remember, this is going to be your system moving forward. I'm just the host and the teacher. I hope it truly explodes your productivity moving forward and makes your life and career goals much more easily attainable. Best of luck. Also, please let me know your thoughts on the series, questions you might have, or any issues you run into. And thank you for your time and support in this endeavor.