Worksighted NXT Webinar | Office 365 Productivity Updates for 2020
Adam Devereaux:
All right. Welcome everyone to another Worksighted NXT Webinar. As you know, we’re going to be talking about what’s new and upcoming in Office 365 and some of which is coming down the line, some of which is available now all under the heading of how can we help you increase your productivity, what are some tips and tricks that we’ve learned and others are using. I just want to get introductions done first. If you don’t know, my name is Adam Devereaux. This is our third webinar so far and I’m excited to introduce Jordan who’s … this is your first time.
Jordan Briney:
Yep, that is correct. My name is Jordan Briney. I’m one of our Remote Support Team engineers here over at Worksighted. It’s a pleasure to be here to share some of my knowledge here of Office 365 with you guys.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so as some of you may know, Microsoft had their ignite conference last month. There’s always kind of a continuing release cycle with Office 365 now. The whole development method has changed, but a lot of these announcements and why we wanted to make a special webinar about this are coming out of that. Some things which are available now, some of which are coming in 2020. We’ll try to make sure that we specify which is which. It’s important to understand that there are a couple of different release channels. There’s reasons why I can show you some of these things and you may not have them right now. That’s because when they release updates to Office through Office 365, even the desktop apps, there’s two main channels. There’s the general availability channel, and then there’s the Office insider program.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s like a development channel that you can elect to join. So, you get access to the latest features and capabilities, but potentially at the expense of stability. Bugs are more likely to be there. They’re not quite as tested. That’s something that we generally recommend you not necessarily have your users adopt across the board, but generally once a feature is in there, it’s going to move to general availability within a month or two. There’s also some features that Microsoft announced that we can’t show live, but we have some clips up just to kind of show you what those features are and we’ll talk about them. Those are going to be coming soon within the next few months as well.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, for sure. One of the big things that we’re going to be covering today is, it can be anything from your normal drivers of PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Outlook, to things like new Teams integrations that could be coming along here. I’m pretty excited to give you guys a lot of new updates on what’s going to be going on here. Something to hopefully make your day run a little bit faster here throughout the 9:00 to 5:00, and it’ll be fun to see it, but Adam, I think a little housekeeping to take care of first.
Adam Devereaux:
I got a little housekeeping. Yeah, for sure. This is an ongoing series where we really want to make sure that we’re engaging with the type of content that you want to see and it’s meant to be really a question and answer session as well. As we go through this, feel free to post your questions that you come up with as we’re going along. Then at the Q&A section, we’ll go through those and try to make sure that we can get to all of those. We also have a lot of great content on our YouTube channel. If you just search Worksighted in YouTube, you’ll find our tech rifts and other content in there as well. There are some videos in there that dive into more detail about some of the specifics that we’ll just broadly cover over. There also will be a recording available of this afterwards as well if you want to share it with others.
Adam Devereaux:
With that being said, we wanted to dig into a couple of different appetizers first, some simple things that you may have access to now or are coming soon and are in the insider. Then we’ll get into some of the more meat and potatoes around things like Teams and tasks to do things along those lines. I’m going to start with PowerPoint. Some of you may have already seen or use some of these, but there are some new capabilities that we wanted to go over. Some updates that are available to you if you are using office through Office 365 or if you’re using PowerPoint in the web through Office 365 as well are related to design.
Adam Devereaux:
In Office 365, if you have some content, let’s say you have a photo that’s in here as well. There’s this new AI driven a feature called design ideas. Oh yeah. It kicked me out. All right, so let me back up a little bit. I’m starting from home. I’m going to get rid of the design ideas here. I’m just in a very basic PowerPoint right now. So if I go to design and then there’s design ideas … Poor network quality, it says. The Internets are busy right now.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, we have so much traffic coming in through this webinar that it seems to be impacting the entire internet at this moment. It’s okay. We’ll get it up and going for you here in a second. Yeah, to touch base here while he takes care of that, so in regarding to some pieces that we’re seeing in PowerPoints, what he’s going to be showing here in a moment is the new designer theme that we can put together as a part of PowerPoints. We’ll touch base on that in a second, but another part that could be potentially advantageous for those in marketing or in other aspects, you can design branded templates so that over the course of your corporate structure, maybe this will help you out where you can brand a specific style, a specific theme and put a little bit of your own company flare behind it and design a template to which that you can use a company-wide throughout your parts here.
Jordan Briney:
There’s other parts such as designers perspective that’ll be putting stuff together. A feature that, maybe even not necessarily, is always going to be perfect for school and for but also for work could also be presenter coach, but it looks like you’ve got designer theme sharing here now?
Adam Devereaux:
Oh, can you see my screen now?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yes, I can.
Adam Devereaux:
All right. Guess we can fix things after all sometimes. All right, so we’ll see if this continues to work well or not, but I’ll show you a visual of that. Again, in PowerPoint, if I’m at the home screen, I’ll get rid of the design ideas here and then go to the design menu up top and then you have this little designer design ideas that pops out. If I have a photo in here or some other content, it’s going to find content that is relevant to, or we’ll actually do cropping with that photo and do some interesting themes along those lines. The real innovation that they added with this is that the design ideas can be more of a template than just a one off slide.
Adam Devereaux:
Previously, when you created a slides and you use the designer, it was like on a slide by slide basis. Whereas now, you can have a designer inspired template slide and then it will derive off from that. As Jordan said, you can administratively create corporate content. So they’re already branded, they have your logo in it and things along those lines. So the users can quickly create PowerPoint slides with that overall aesthetic and logo embedded in it.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, and not all of us are necessarily a large scale graphics designers. So, stuff like this can really help put that extra flair and technique into your presentations that may not have been available beforehand. Stuff like this might’ve been available in some auto-complete features, but now putting together this designer theme really helps us out in the long haul for that there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, so another feature that they announced is the designer coach or presenter coach is what they call it. The idea there is that you can actually record yourself giving a presentation and it will analyze your performance. It looks at your speech patterns, how many times you say um, and using other pausers like you know, for example. It also identifies when you’re just reading the slide because that’s one of the no-nos. We don’t want to put a lot of content up and then just read through that slide. That’s going to be available soon to general availability. I’m interested to see how well that actually works. I don’t know if I really want a computer judging me in terms of how well I present, but we’ll see. Maybe it’ll help me.
Jordan Briney:
Well, and sometimes in a pinch of time too, it can help out. I can’t necessarily always help you out when you’re trying to design PowerPoint presentations Adam.
Adam Devereaux:
Exactly. Well, I think Becca would be more likely the one. Great. A couple other quick ones. There’s a new capability with Cortana through Outlook on the mobile, which is really quite interesting. I’ve started working with this and testing it out while driving. Basically, it’s a way that you can interact with your email purely through a voice interface and allows you to play it and actually respond to or flag or deal with your messages. Some of you may have groaned when I said Cortana, but I will say, from my experience, this is probably the most useful in that AI assistant space, specifically around email.
Cortana:
Right now I’ve got 42 emails for you, including a couple of other updates.
Adam Devereaux:
We’ve got a little catching up to do.
Jordan Briney:
We’re busy people.
Cortana:
This could take about half an hour.
Jordan Briney:
Don’t worry, we won’t go through the entire email.
Cortana:
A few minutes ago, IT strategy digest sent an email about a CIO list of edge, including trends to keep an eye on in 2020.
Adam Devereaux:
Hey, Cortana. Archive this.
Cortana:
Sure thing. I’ll archive it.
Adam Devereaux:
Then, if I let it continue, it’ll keep going through all of my emails, new emails, it will tell me about changes to my day with invites, allow me to reply to those except decline. It really has a lot of voice interaction, more so than what I’ve seen previously. Something to try out if you’re using Outlook on the mobile client. We’ll be talking about more of the Office and other apps that are available in the mobile client, but it’s a cool little quick one that you can test out right now.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, it’s a nice feature, especially for those, like you said, when you’re driving, anything to go even from, maybe you’re just walking down the street and you just need to catch up on emails as you’re walking into the office and it gives you a lot of perspective to be able to sort through things a little bit quicker here, just in case you don’t want to have your head down looking at your phone and bump into something, or rather be looking at your email while driving.
Rebecca Zaagman:
How do I find it?
Adam Devereaux:
If you are not using the Outlook app on your mobile client now, I would recommend you download it and test it out. In your App Store on Android, iOS, you just search Outlook. It’s Microsoft’s official outlook app. In many ways, I prefer to the built-in client. I’ve switched over recently. I was using both for a while. I was still using the built-in mail app on my iOS device. Within the last couple of months, I switched over to outlook as my primary and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. You have to get used to the interface a little bit. Those of you like myself that have been using the iOS mail client for years, you may find a little adjusting, but there’s a lot of capabilities that you can’t do like opening shared calendars and really more broad set of features compared to the built-in mail app.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah. Our next thing, as Adam’s actually drafting up a sentence for this year, is going to be about the new feature that’s coming to Microsoft Word that’s called rewrite. The summary of it basically goes, say that you’re composing something, whether it’d be a report or document and you’re not really sure how exactly to word this. Well, that’s where rewrite can come in and help you out here. You can take a look and see and Microsoft can give you suggestions based on maybe better ways to potentially write that sentence. Adam, if you want to take it away with that shared screen here when he spelled checks, of course.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. Let me show you here a minute on, and it’s a Word document I have up. I don’t know if you can switch to this screen here, Becca.
Rebecca Zaagman:
The Word Doc?
Adam Devereaux:
Minimize this one. So the Word Doc here. Switch to the other screen. Sorry.
Rebecca Zaagman:
I’ve only got one option with this screen.
Adam Devereaux:
Technical difficulties galore. Well, that’s because I’m in the wrong one.
Jordan Briney:
We’re close. Yeah, so the big part about rewrite is that it allows us to be able to compose and redesign a sentence to something that might potentially sound more professional or have a different creative flow that we’re not normally acclimated to in our day to day. For myself, who writes probably about 25 to 30 different emails per day, stuff like this can really come in handy, especially when we’re designing something together here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. In many ways, it’s like a Thesaurus that’s powered by AI. I’m looking to see, as I use this throughout the day, how well it ultimately works, but it can show you live. It’s a really quick way. If you feel like you’re reusing a word a lot, which happens to me sometimes when I read back through. and I’m like, I just used broader five times. Right? Right off the bat, you can see if I select a word and I go to rewrite in the menu here, then it gives me a couple of different suggestions for me to liven up my language a little bit. One of the things too is that this is, we want to let you guys know, as we go through these, which ones are general availability, which ones are insider. The reason I couldn’t see it on this one yet is because, apparently the insider version didn’t install correctly.
Adam Devereaux:
I do have that on my laptop and so I have that rewrite feature here. However, as you can see, I did not have that in my right click menu here. So no rewrite. If you wonder why you’re missing it, it’s in the insider release and that will be available soon.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Can you show again?
Jordan Briney:
Show the rewrite? Yeah.
Adam Devereaux:
Process, yeah.
Jordan Briney:
As you can see, so like let’s say I want to highlight broader audience here as an example. Oops. Say if I want to highlight this, you can see that it’s right here under rewrite. Now you can see there’s a couple different ways that we can put that together. We started out with reach a broader audience. We can reach a wider audience, we can consolidate that a bit. It gives us different options. So, allow us to be able to design something that, again, sounds professional and that’s, like you said, avoid repeated and grammatically sound a little bit more logical.
Adam Devereaux:
One of the reasons why we wanted to highlight this and also the PowerPoint designer is a lot of what Microsoft announced and the intent behind what they call the Microsoft graph is how this is all coming together as a converged platform. One of their big missions is to use their AI capabilities and cloud capabilities to bring really enhanced capabilities to everyone. Allowing us to tap into those tools through our common everyday interfaces and improve the type of content that we create, improve a lot regarding that. This is just one of the areas. There’s a couple other things. I don’t think we’re necessarily going to talk about, but there’s transcription live transcription, there’s live translation that’s going to be in chat functions or chat features and Teams for example.
Adam Devereaux:
There’s a lot of ways that they’re embedding that. One of the cool things with Excel mobile now that’s coming out for example, is that you’re going to be able to take a photo of a piece of paper that has a table or some sort of table like content, and it will use AI to actually make that into a table in Excel.
Jordan Briney:
Right.
Adam Devereaux:
AI is a little buzzwordy, but that’s what Microsoft says anyway.
Rebecca Zaagman:
We’ve got a lot of questions coming in.
Adam Devereaux:
Okay.
Jordan Briney:
Okay.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Make sure you repeat the question in the mic. What’s the difference between rewrite and synonyms?
Adam Devereaux:
The question is what’s the difference between rewrite and synonyms? The idea behind rewrite and what Microsoft says in this case is that it’s taking into context the larger sentence, and that you can do rewrite on a much larger scale within the sentence. I would say probably more similarly to Grammarly, if you use that at all.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Then, with rewrite, how many characters or words can fit into a highlighted section?
Adam Devereaux:
You can highlight the whole sentence.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah. Let me go ahead and re pull up that word document here and if you want to swap me back over. Let’s just say we take that entire sentence here. How can we reach a broader audience? Then let’s go ahead and rewrite. At this case, it didn’t give me anything different because it might’ve just liked the structure that was already put together here. So let me go ahead and just say …
Adam Devereaux:
It looks like it’s optimally within about five words. It’s part of a sentence.
Jordan Briney:
We’ll give it a little bit of a different sentence to try it out here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yes, we’ll do it live.
Jordan Briney:
It didn’t grab anything there. It might be regarding the specific structure then. It looks like this is … being an initial release, might potentially not conclude everything.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, try just doing like the fox jumps for example or just right click on jumps.
Jordan Briney:
Let’s go ahead and put that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Does this work in Outlook as well and other …?
Adam Devereaux:
It does not yet. It’s only in Word right now.
Jordan Briney:
It looks like I might’ve just given it too easy of a sentence, it said, “No, you’re grammatically correct, Jordan.” Here we go. In this case here, so you actually noticed, so if you look to the right hand side, it actually shows different ways of writing this phrase. So, it highlights over the moon. So again, this could be different …
Adam Devereaux:
Well, this is interesting too because if you’d know, it actually recognized that, over the moon, is saying as well. One of the suggestions it’s offering is ecstatic. Right? It’s an interesting example. It’s a little bit more advanced than just a Thesaurus type function, but I think it’s a little bit wait and see. Again, this is in the insider release so we haven’t had a lot of time to play around with it yet.
Jordan Briney:
Right.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Again, a couple questions about Cortana. Can you clarify, it is in the outlook app?
Adam Devereaux:
It is in the Outlook app, yeah.
Rebecca Zaagman:
And repeat the question. Then, people are asking about Siri as well.
Jordan Briney:
At this time, Siri is not supported by that part. The question was behind, does Siri support the same functionalities that are within the Outlook app. To answer that question, and correct me if I’m wrong, it does not. That falls under Cortana specifically and Cortana is built within Outlook for that function. You’ll hear a Cortana’s voice come from and be utilized within the Outlook mobile app there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. You also have the option to select a male voice now with Cortana, but the interface on screen, I know you can’t see it, but if you basically click your face in the outlook app and look at the menu of all the options that are available to you, above the question mark in the gear, there’ll be a little play button. So you just tap that and it will go into that function.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah. The next thing, I want to make sure we keep rolling here cause there’s plenty of features for us to discuss here. Next thing that provided to be very interesting, especially as a company for us that utilize team is very heavily the ability to mention supports or @mention, I should say, support in Outlook PowerPoint and Word. Adam, do you want to dive in a little bit on what we need to do for that?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, this one we can’t necessarily show too much and it’s really going to be kind of a teaser to where things are going with tasks and to-do. I’ll show you an example of what you can do now and then how this is going to go further. Right now if I’m in a word document and I’m sharing this with others, I can add a new comment here or I can do the same here. Right now, I can just put a comment in here. Let me do a new one. All right, so if I go to select a word or a sentence, hit new comment, I have this tech riffs demo. It would be my name if I was doing this under my account. I can basically put a comment in there and then others would be able to reply to it or I can resolve it.
Adam Devereaux:
What they’re going to be adding is the ability to at mention, like you can in Teams, and I’d be able to basically type somebody’s name in here and then they will receive notification of that. I think that will make more sense within the context of the to-do function we want to talk about. This is going to be one of the ones that we spend a little bit more time on. Microsoft to-do is another task management application. There’s a lot of them out there. However, it’s built into Office 365. If you don’t know, Microsoft bought Wunderlist a couple of years ago and so it’s built on a lot of the Wunderlist feature set, but the vision for it is it’s going to be the unifying task management interface for everything that happens within Office 365 that is a task assignment or to-do assignment, but there are some really cool capabilities right now that we want to go into.
Adam Devereaux:
I’m going to show you what that looks like. To-do itself is available in the mobile client, it’s available on the web. It’s available as an app that I can download on my computer. What I’m doing right now is I’m logged into Office 365 in the web. I click up in the left hand corner, there’s what they call affectionately the waffle, but this is the app launcher. In here I have to-do, which I’m going to click on. This is essentially what the starting interface looks like. Right off the bat we’ll note that there’s an interface where on the left here I’ve got my day important planned, assigned to you, flagged email and tasks. I don’t really have any tasks right now. I can hit plus, I can just quick type, I could make this a task that’s related to a specific subject if I want to sort these out by creating lists.
Adam Devereaux:
If I want to create a subcategory, like let’s say it’s regarding webinars. I can just click and drag tasks to that list or I can add specific, let’s say ideas. Now I have this list and I can add a task into that. There are some interesting things that you can do with the task itself. If I right click on it, I get add to my day. This is a way to help you prioritize and determine what tasks I should be focusing on. I can mark it as important and I can assign a due date. Right off the bat I could say due tomorrow, but I could go into it and do quite a bit more if I wanted to pick a specific date that this needs to be due. Let’s say I want to work on it today, so I’m going to click add to my day.
Adam Devereaux:
Now, another thing that I can do when I have a list is I can actually share that list. If I want to create an invitation and share that with Rebecca so that she also can see those, I can do that. I can copy the link and send it via an email. I can basically add people right within this. Then there’s limitations and some restrictions that I can set up there as well. Now, this is probably not entirely new for those of you that have worked with a task management, this is kind of that base feature set. Some of the ways that this is really, I found to be useful, and I’m starting to switch to this personally as my main to-do, is the fact that there’s a couple of basic integrations that are really powerful. I’ll show you what that looks like.
Adam Devereaux:
Right off the bat here, if you look on the left, you’ll see that there’s already a flagged email and then there’s a assigned to you. I’ve wanted to have a way for quite a long time for me, even on my phone to assign something for followup later. Some of you use flagged emails. Now, what’s difficult is if you have email like I do and you’ve got a hundred plus a day, even still finding those and filtering those, it can be a little bit tricky. What I did earlier is I flagged this email here from Rebecca, and if I go back, I can see under flagged email. Here’s that task that was automatically created. I can do a couple different things here. I can add more content to this, I can add reminders, a due date, I can add it to my day, I can add follow up steps, I can pin a file to that task or I can open it back up in Outlook and see what the original email was.
Adam Devereaux:
This is a quick way for me to just say, okay, I need to return to this. It can fit into some email organization strategies that are out there. This is really cool because regardless of where I’m looking at my email, whether it’s my desktop client or through the web or on my phone, all I have to do is flag that email and now it’s on my to-do list to work on later. If you’re in the Outlook interface, you can actually see this. If you go up to the top right hand corner where you have, normally you’d see your picture, but you have this little my day button. If I click that, I get a couple different options. One is I can see my calendar from within this interface and I can also click to-do.
Adam Devereaux:
I can actually add a task right in here manually and I can see my tasks or I can just click and drag an email over to here and now it’s a task that’s going to show up in my to-do here as well. I can also pop that out. If I want to jump right into the full to-do interface, I can do that right from clicking there. Now in this case, it’s a little different because when I dragged that over to be a task, it actually shows up in my main task list here, not in my flagged emails, but I have the ability to go in and click open and outlook because it recognizes that was an email address that was created from within the Outlook.
Jordan Briney:
Yep. Again, one of the big things about this is that it’s nice that you have the ability to centralize what’s your focus on throughout the day. You could be working within outlook and move right to to-do and manage your entire day through that system here. For I, myself, who probably schedules about 12 to 13 different phone calls and emails a day, that to me is a wonderful piece and a tool because that to me helps me in my day-to-day and hopefully that does for you guys as well.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Will these tasks be available outside of the web app, for example, directly in the Outlook desktop?
Adam Devereaux:
Yes.
Jordan Briney:
The question was, is to-do available outside of just the web browser version of it and the answer to that is, yes. Within to-do, you can download the application, which then can integrate with your Outlook application and manage stuff from there as well. You can run to-do from the application side or you can run it from your web browser depending on where you’re at, what device you’re working on and what you’re doing there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and personally I use the to do app on my phone. So I have all of the same functionality that I can see my lists, I can see what’s been assigned to me, flagged email, all of those things right within this interface as well. The the other area in to-do, and then this shows more of an indication of where things are going, which is where you have lots of ways that you can assign tasks to people within the Office 365 environment. Can you see my screen? I’m going to walk you through the whole factor of adding a planner to a team, or process I should say. Let me make sure that you can see my screen first.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Adam Devereaux:
Okay, perfect. What am I going to do is I’m going to click add a tab, and then right off the bat, for those of you that … I should say right off the bat here, if you are unfamiliar with Teams, our first webinar was more of a deep dive into Teams. I’d recommend you take a look at that. We’ll be going into some of the more specific things inside of Teams that you can do. There’s a lot of great video content. We’re definitely going to have more webinars, deep diving into team’s content. But for now, we’re going to try to focus on some of these specific capabilities. Right inside of here, I click add a tab and I have lots of different things that I can pick, but the one I’m concerned about here is planner. I have the ability to create a planner. I’m just going to call it team to-dos, or let’s call it team tasks.
Adam Devereaux:
A couple of things happen. One is that it creates the tab within that channel. Then the other thing is that it’s going to post in the channel about that. Right off the bat, when I’m clicked in it here, I have the ability to create tasks, to create buckets. So, I could call this one, whatever I want to call it. I can add a task, I can add a specific name to that task and then I can assign it to a specific person. In this case, I’m going to assign it to myself and I’m going to set a due date of the 31st. Now, this is a specific planner task and I can interact with it through planner itself, which I can just go into the planner interface and this becomes like a hub where I can see all of the tasks that are assigned to me, regardless of which plan that they’re in.
Adam Devereaux:
There is planner on the phone as well, but again, because to-do is trying to become that centralized location, if you go here and look under the assigned to you, you can see there’s more team stuff. It’s a team’s task. I can open it in planner or I can interact with it right here and say, “Yep, I’ve completed that.” Then ultimately, this will show up in planner as completed as well. Let me click on the right stuff.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, as we near our time here on the rest of the webinar, just a few things we’re just going to gloss over here as parts. We just wanted to make sure new features coming to Teams as we were speaking about that is that there will be announcements and headlines coming together for that private channels and you will be able to post to multiple channels, clarify on the multiple channels?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, actually, these are available now. So announcements which are headlines, so when you post in a team, you have the ability to create that as a headline so it calls more attention to it. That’s something that’s available just by clicking up here and going to announcement. Then now, it’s more, I can add a picture, I can change the color, I can add multiple content. Then you also have this option here to post in multiple channels. That allows me to write a post one time. If I want it to show up in two or three different channels, I can just pick the ones that I want it to be sent to. Another feature that’s available now is private channels. If I want to add a channel to a team, I have the ability to pick, is this a private or a standard?
Adam Devereaux:
This is a much requested feature because previously whenever you created a channel inside of a team, all the team members always had access to it. Now I can create a channel inside of a team that only a subset of users have access to if that’s something that I want to do. Then, another thing that’s also now just newly available is the new files interface. For those of you that interact with files within Teams, if you click into like an Excel document or a Word document, they’ve really simplified that interface to make it more cohesive, better experience, where the overall view of it is much simpler and allows you to just jump right into it. Previously you had like a special Teams interface. Now, I’m just in it as an actual editing content and I can do all of the things that I can with Excel online right through this interface. So it’s a lot more cohesive.
Adam Devereaux:
Things that are coming down the road that are not available yet that they announced are chat pop outs. This is one that we’re pretty excited about because previously when you interacted a chat, you just had this interface and you had to ump between people with this one interface. With the new one, you’ll be able to pop those out. That’s going to be awesome. Tasks are going to be assigned and viewable within Teams as well and you’re going to be able to take people, that’s going to be a big one, where you can assign different labels to users and then at mention those labels. Team pinning is another one too, where if you have a lot of Teams, you’ll be able to pin specific Teams to the top so that it helps make that interface a lot cleaner.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah. I’m blaming the weather. Time has flew by too fast for us here. We’re actually a little bit past our time here. The last little thing I was going to mention is that, for those of you who are native to third party Dragon speak, which is the availability of digital transcription, allows you the option to now, coming up in 2020, to be able to natively transcribe what you speak to word within that system. Cool thing, check it out there in the future. We won’t be able to cover it too much as we are out of time here. If there’s any additional last minute questions you guys have about what we covered today, feel free to go ahead and throw them down together and we’ll be happy to hear them out for you for a couple of moments.
Adam Devereaux:
Do we have any questions?
Rebecca Zaagman:
We do. Remember to repeat it. For screenshots that turns over to Excel, does the image has to be in a certain format.
Adam Devereaux:
No. The way that that’s going to work, so the question was regarding the feature I mentioned where you’re going to be able to snap a picture of like a piece of paper that has content that you want to integrate into Excel directly. It’s actually going to be through the mobile interface. I think that you can interact with photos that you’ve already taken, but I haven’t tested that yet. It’s similar to if you use One Drive now or Office Lens previously where you can take a photo of a document and then it will scan that in and clean it up. This is a specific feature that’s coming to the Office app, which we haven’t talked much about. That’s actually available in preview right now, unfortunately only on Android devices because Apple has some restrictions around how many people can access that, and that’s already filled up on iOS.
Adam Devereaux:
But you can download it if you have an Android app and that’s a converged mobile app. It has Excel, Word, PowerPoint, all in one, and that’s where that feature functionality will be in. You launch your office, you’ll take a photo of something, you decide where it goes, it can go into Excel, you can say, “I want this to be a table.” And it will just automatically make that a table in Excel. It looks pretty magical. We haven’t gotten our hands on it too much yet though mostly because we’re all iPhone users and we can’t get it, so it’s sad.
Jordan Briney:
Yep.
Adam Devereaux:
All right, so any more questions?
Jordan Briney:
All right. A friendly reminder, if you have any last minute questions, this is the time to do so. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Yeah, aside from that, going into 2020, a big focus as we … to circle back to what we began the conversation with is a lot about centralizing, how you use Office in the most productive manner possible. Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, a lot of those have integrations between each other that allow us to be able to make our days run a little bit quicker, especially for those that are are running from place to place constantly throughout their day.
Adam Devereaux:
Exactly. Although on that note, I will say probably the number one thing that you can do now is look at Teams and adopting Teams if you haven’t right now. It doesn’t work for everyone in every situation, but with all of the great new features that they’re adding, there’s a couple of different levels of adoption. It gets a little complicated because Teams really has a lot of capabilities. Right off the bat, most organizations start with using chat and screen sharing as their starter. That’s been our journey at Worksighted. We’ve been shifting more and more and more things into Teams and we were just having a conversation earlier this week how it feels like there’s kind of a culture shift. People that are out in the field who previously preferred email, they’re starting to want to use Teams as primary communication.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s become the way to get ahold of somebody within the organization, send a chat. Even Teams call is almost a default because then I don’t have to worry about having everybody’s cell phone number. When you start storing files inside of that as well, personally, I found it really starts to get to where you have that universal access to those things. You’ve got lots of great capabilities like simultaneous editing to have auto save, but it really, once you’re actually working with files that are stored within SharePoint, One Drive and Teams, files ultimately are layered over top of SharePoint, it really makes a big difference.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Repeat the question. What is the Office 365 Android app called?
Adam Devereaux:
That’s a good question.
Jordan Briney:
The Office 365 in Android app, that is called, actually that is a good question. I’m trying to think of the name that’s for that …
Adam Devereaux:
Yes.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah, we can confirm that for you here.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Also, does the to-do app match up with tasks in Outlook?
Jordan Briney:
The question was, does to-do app match with tasks in Outlook? To which we can answer the question, yes. To-do can synchronize with outlook as a can synchronize with planner, which is nice because then you basically have a three applications that can serve as one purpose within your system. You’ve got the name for that?
Adam Devereaux:
I do. It’s a little bit, because it’s a public preview, you can’t just search it in the app store. There’s a little bit of a process you have to follow. What I would search is Android Office app preview and then you’ll find some articles about it and we can post some links in the chat later. Basically, what you have to do is join a Google group, a preview group. Once you join that, then you’ll have access to download it from the Play Store. Again, I don’t know, because I don’t have an Android phone and I don’t have it yet.
Jordan Briney:
Right. Yeah, and again, just because it’s on Android at the moment doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be coming to iOS soon.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, it is available on iOS too, those lucky 10,000 people that got into it.
Jordan Briney:
Yes, exactly.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s ultimately Apple’s restrictions in terms of how many people can work with a prerelease application.
Jordan Briney:
Right. Yeah, and those will come in due time, and I’m sure that’s … I’m not sure if it’s going to be 2020, but I know they’ll probably add a desktop version of that too. Yeah, keep an eye on it. I’m sure you’ll see a little bit extra feature on that as we go along.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and that new office app is really a complete redesign for mobile. They really took the opportunity to figure out some of the unique capabilities with mobile devices that they can bring to those platforms, like the content capture and how can we redesign those interfaces to be more usable on smaller mobile screens. I’m really excited to adopt that. But really, this went by super fast. There’s a lot more that we could talk about. There are a lot of great content online. Microsoft has some videos, Microsoft mechanics, what’s new with Office 365. Another way that you can see some of this stuff yourself in Word and Excel is if you just go to the help menu, and then there’s a, what’s new, button that you can click and it will take you to release notes about new capabilities, new features that have been updated.
Adam Devereaux:
Sure. Whether you’re in Word or Excel, PowerPoint, you should be able to generally click the what’s new button and it will take you to a list on the side of the screen that shows new updates, and then ultimately you can go to the website as well to see that content.
Jordan Briney:
Yeah. Friendly reminder, of course, anything that we didn’t cover here today and you’re a little bit curious, just check out our blogs here on our website as we have a lot of cool stuff over there. Our tech riffs are also a joy to watch, especially when we have advanced CGI describing productivity updates. With that being said, I think that that wraps up the webinar, unless we have any other questions here from the audience.
Adam Devereaux:
Great. Thanks for sticking around, for those of you that are still with us, and hopefully you learned a few things and maybe excited to test some of those out, and we’ll see you again at next time.
Worksighted Team
We are a team of over-enthusiastic people, ready to help our clients utilize technology to spur growth! We love technology and come to work every day eager to solve problems and find ways to impact our clients.
