5 Ways to Boost Productivity with Office 365

Microsoft’s Office 365 is the go-to productivity suite for businesses of all sizes. It differs from previous versions of Microsoft Office because it’s actually cloud-based.

Some versions of the monthly subscription come with 20gb of storage in Microsoft’s OneDrive, a free hour each month of international calls on Skype, or even the desktop versions of popular programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Since it’s cloud-based, businesses pay a monthly subscription instead of a one-time fee. The upside is that you always have the most recent version of the program instead of having to buy new software every time a new version comes out.

Office 365 is wildly convenient “out of the box.” But if you’re interested in making it even more convenient, you’ve come to the right place. There are plugins you can use to make Office 365 work for you even more and improve productivity.

1. DocuSign for Outlook

Outlook is Office 365’s mail client, and DocuSign is a program that allows you to sign anything electronically. The combination is absolutely unstoppable.

Sign documents right in Outlook and automatically save them to OneDrive for safe keeping. This plugin helps with productivity by allowing you and your team to sign documents and request signatures quickly, which keeps the wait for bureaucracy to a minimum.

2. Grammarly

Dramatically minimize embarrassing spelling and grammar mistakes with Grammarly.

This simple plugin checks your writing and offers corrections with explanations and suggestions to improve your piece of writing. It’s available as a browser extension or as a plugin that works directly in Microsoft Word and Outlook. Why not use both to make sure that your writing in documents and e-mails is always on point?

One of our favorite features is how Grammarly catches those pesky “contextual spelling and grammar mistakes.” The premium version suggests different and better vocabulary to use and it’s so smart it adapts to your writing style and specific genres of writing.

3. Boomerang

Are you the kind of person who reads an email, stops to think about it, gets distracted and moves on to something else, leaving the message to marinate until it gets totally forgotten about?

Boomerang will remind you about unanswered emails in Outlook and lets you schedule emails to be sent in the future, as well.

4. FindTime

Does finding the right time to schedule a meeting with your colleagues take more time than the meeting itself?

Use FindTime to easily find when everyone needed is available and propose a few different meeting times to the group. Participants get to vote on which meeting time they like best, and voila! You’ve got a meeting.

5. Pexels

Pexels is a plugin that allows you to improve your reports and documents by easily inserting high-quality images. All available images are protected by a Creative Commons Zero license, meaning they can be used for free.

You can save images that you might like to use in the future, browse popular images, or just use the search feature to find the perfect picture that will make your report or document shine.

Microsoft’s Office 365 is pretty convenient to begin with, but these plugins can make it even better. You can get the most out of your 365 subscription and make the Office suite of programs work for you!

Not using 365 yet? Contact your managed IT services provider to see how easy it can be to make that a reality.