Office 365 | Focus on Outlook (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Ziad: Hello, and welcome everyone to our next webinar series for Office 365. Today we’re gonna be discussing Outlook, and some of the basic as well as some new features that are included within Outlook for 2018/2019. My name is Ziad Paracha and I am the Account Executive at Encore Business Solutions, a gold partner for Microsoft. Now, today we’re not really going to go through a slide deck, we’re going to go right into our demo and kind of show you the environment, how it looks. I’ll try showing you both the environment that is on the app that you can actually pin to your Start Bar as well as the online Outlook as well for Office 365.

Now, I just kind of created a new folder within the inbox, just so we can kind of be clean in starting this so you can kind of, you know, look at your own view and see how that looks as well. So, just to begin from the start, we’ll do a quick summary of what it looks like on the top for the channels and ribbons that are here. So, the first one is for the file. All the things you can kind of look at your own information that you have, you can change some of the settings here. We’ll kind of go into this a little bit more near the end of our webinar here today as well. You can set up automatic replies from here as well, Out-of-Office replies, and it kind of looks just similar to this, and you can text up anything that you’d want just to say here. You’re out of the office for this week, or you’re going to be working remotely, and so on and so forth. This will automatically send any inbox, any emails that are incoming to your inbox will automatically get this response so that they’re always updated and you don’t end up having to kind of clarify anything for yourself.

Storage that you have within your mailbox can be viewed here. Any rules or alerts that you want to set can also be managed through this file toolbar here. You can set new rules, as you can see, I’ve never set a rule yet, I didn’t have a need for it, but if you need to set rules, you can actually move certain things to make sort of organized, flag certain things that you want to follow up for. And this is really great for like marketing strategies as well as if you’re in a sales as well, you want to be able to kind of follow up with people and know who to kind of contact at what time. Sometimes it kind of slips your mind, but you can kind of set these kinds of rules here to stay organized, stay up to date with some of the display alerts that kind of show up. You can have certain sounds setup when a particular email comes up from someone that you need to kind of respond to, or that’s urgent, you can have different sounds be played as well, and of course apply those rules as well. So, we’re not going to set any rules today, but just so you know that they’re all over in this kind of channel here. Sorry about that.

You can add in some more add-ins, you can have add-ins basically. I’m not going to go through that, it’s all online, you can set up add-ons that you can put into your tool, into your Outlook. We’ve got some that are already inserted in there as well, but if you need to, you can manage all sorts of add-ins that come right through here, right? So these are all turned on, you can turn them off. And if you have the access that is not restricted by your IT administrators, you can actually even insert new additions of add-ons as well. Of course, manage your voice mail here. You can actually play a recording, whether it’s a greeting or a setup of your email on how they can kind of go through that. We’ll go through a few more of these later on as well.

Here’s our Home. As you can see over here, just the new…there’s different kind of ribbons that kind of show New, there’s Delete, Respond, Quick Step, so on and so forth. You can change these at any time and modify these kinds of tabs. I like to keep it fairly clean and easy to use, and then I can use this Search Bar here, which is really fantastic, and we’re going to be using that throughout this demo as well. So, let’s say if we want to send up a new email, simply click that and it can pop up into a new email, or what you can do is actually double click this area right here in your inbox, and that will also allow you to open a new window to be able to send your email. Now, there’s a couple ways you can actually send someone an email. There’s an Address Book. Of course you have to set this on the back-end using, you know, your Active Directory, or all those kinds of capabilities in the back-end to be able to access names like that, or you can click here and search those names so you can see who you want to kind of send that email to, or you can just simply click here and send a particular email to somebody. CC, BCC, we know how to use those. Subject Matter, we can try that. Actually, I’m just going to send an email to myself, just so that I’m not disturbing anybody else on our team here and they’re confused. And let’s say we’re going to test an email. Now, cool features that you can kind of involve here as well is, while I’m typing, let’s say, you know, “I love doing my job.” Right? I can actually, you know, search different things from here. So let’s say love is not a really good word, that get’s too intimate for me to share professionally, so I can go in here and actually see send it in for that, and actually change that, and all of those look even more intimate, so I’m not going to choose any of those. You can translate it into a particular language. What’s really cool here, is the feature that I really want to emphasize, is the Smart Lookup feature.

I can actually click that Smart Lookup, and this will all open up a new kind of tab on the side here for me to really tell you what love actually means. Okay, so it’s an intense feeling of deep affection, not something that I’d want to do in my work and play, so, we’re going to continue. And this is very interesting, but I’m not going to look at that now. You can also define that terminology. So let’s say you go into the definition right here, and you can see what the definition of it means. This is actually a Bing Search for Explorer, you can see other links that will come up that you can explore, and of course we can do this on a more serious topic as well to be able to do that. And of course you can click on that and it’ll open a new window and you can see a whole article of things that will be there. You can also access more of it if this is not enough, right through this Smart Lookup. So very, very cool feature that you can use to kind of impress somebody in your email responses by knowing some of the knowledge that’s there.

You can also do something really cool is, you know, a lot of times we’re sending emails, and there are, you know, a level of professionalism that we should have, so spellchecks, grammar, all of this kind of stuff. So let’s say I work at Encore, which is a Microsoft…now, as you can see, I’ve purposely done this, right? So, don’t fire me, I’m going to show you how you can actually figure out grammar mistakes. We can already see the similar red line underneath, that’s here. You can check the spelling right through here, if that’s actually the right spelling you can add that to the dictionary and so on and so forth. But, another thing you can do is, under Review, you can actually check for spelling and grammar. Now, if you click that, it will highlight all sorts of different things that you can kind of change, and you can actually change all of them if you’ve done multiple different iterations of the same mistake, or you can have the setups auto-correct, you can ignore it if it’s the right collection. Basically, there’s lots of things that you can do here to fix that. So let’s say I wanna change this one just because I’ve made one mistake, it will give you a notification saying, “Hey, your spell check is complete, your email is good to go.” and you can do that. This way, you don’t have to have to, you know, put in add-ons, or connectors, or have third party applications do this work for you because Outlook has got that capability within it as well.

You can also access a Thesaurus here, and of course word count. So it’ll show you, you know, how many pages there are of the email, how many words there are, and spaces and so on and so forth, similar to how it would show you on a word document or anything like that. Now, I’ve seen people actually, you know, if there’s limited word restrictions, actually copy and paste it and trying to use, you know, other web utilities to kind of figure out the word counts. You don’t need to do any of that, it’s all right in here.

You can also read out loud. Now, I’m not sure if you’ll actually be able to hear this, but we’ll try it out anyways. You can actually click this Read Aloud button. It’ll actually read the text that you highlight and tell you how you do that. “I work at Encore which is a Microsoft.” And that is poor sentence structure, but we’ll play with it. You can actually go back and so on and so forth. So if you ever want to kind of listen to, you know, an email, you can select different rates, you can look at whose voice you want to do. So you have Linda’s voice, or you like Richard’s voice, it’s all up to you. “I love doing my job.”

Okay. There’s a Smart Lookup feature, again, so this is another way you can actually do that. Translations and Language, you can actually translate certain items, so, most of the time if I’m getting emails that are from a different language are usually spam, so I don’t really do this anyways, but you can kind of utilize that if you’re working with business partners or places that, you know, maybe you have an international business, or you’re dealing with people from different countries that speak different languages or have different languages, you can actually translate text from here. You can also select a different language to use as well as proofreading, and that is of course from this particular position as well, under the Review tab.

Now, one thing that you can really utilize here is this Search Bar here. So let’s say I didn’t know where the Lookup feature was, I can actually just go Smart Lookup or just look up even, right? And it will come up with what you’re looking for and open up that ribbon that you’re looking for, or even that tab right here, right? And you can work with that. And this is a really…it’s a really integrated feature. You can search just about anything in here, and it will be able to show you where you can access this. So let’s say I want to set up my signature, for example, right? I could just search right here, it’ll show me, okay, here’s your signatures that you can set up. I’ve already created a couple of them, but you can add new ones and format them the way you want, and then you’ll have an automatic signature come up on your emails, or responses, or anything else like that. So, that is really cool on your emailing that you can do. Now, let’s say I want to turn this into a meeting or something like that, I can actually change that into my calendar. So let’s go back out of here. I’m not going to save this, if you save this it actually goes in your drafts folder. So, actually let’s save that, and I’ll show you what it looks like. So, if you go into your drafts, right? I just did a test one, it comes right in here. Now I can actually, you know, revisit that and send an email when I need to.

Now, within this look as well of this kind of, you could see this was blue before I clicked it, as soon as I have read this email, it will now turn colorless basically. And if I want to mark it, right-click it here, I can actually change certain things on this email. So I can either copy this entire email, I could print it real quick, respond, reply, obviously forward, all that kind of stuff. I can also mark it as Unread again, just in case I accidentally clicked that I want to respond to it. It’s good to have that notification, it’s really visible on your devices that you’re using. So, you know, it’s unread still. I can flag it from here, or I could right-click and add a follow-up for that as well, right? So I can actually customize these follow-ups as well to add reminders and have that kind of show me that I have a task to do or to follow up with my clients. You can actually have retention policies as well on this, you can have a whole bunch of different things that you have just as soon as you right-click on any of these emails, and you can kind of set up rules any time you get these emails from Ziad, you just delete them because they’re not important, right? So on and so forth. Please don’t delete my emails.

Junk, you can also block senders, so, any time you get sometimes spam notifications, or, you know, if you’ve signed up for certain things using a work account, it’ll come into your junk, so you can kind of set all of that stuff here as well. You can also delete emails, right? So I can go in here and I say, hey, I didn’t like that, just delete that. It goes into your Delete, you can clear that at any time. Now, let’s say Ziad messaged me and said, you know, have a fantastic day, it motivated me to come to this webinar today. Now I’m going to set a meeting up with him so I get even more motivated, right? So I’m just going to look over here to this response feature, and if you click this top button that’ll actually just reply in a meeting. I can also send them a direct message as well. So I can send him an instant message and reply to him that way, and it’ll pop up, you know, using my Skype account, or other conversation accounts that I can set up, and I can ping him directly to have a quicker response.

But, you know, I want to set a meeting, I want to have a nice, you know, half-hour therapy session with Ziad, so, or a consult session with Ziad. So, this is what I’ll do, I’ll set up a meeting, so I click that, and as you can see, you haven’t invited or I haven’t sent this meeting invitation yet, right? Until I click send. And, you know, I’ll change the setting. Let’s say I want to have it in one of our boardrooms, and you can search rooms here that you’ve set up on the back-end as well, so everyone’s clear. And if I want to invite more people I can as well, right? From that, now I have to choose my method of sending that invite. Now, it could be a face-to-face meeting, in which case that’s perfect, they can come to the boardroom, but sometimes they’re working remotely, or you want to just have a nice chat, you can actually look at Skype, or the new thing which is coming and it’s Teams, right? So if you open up a Teams meeting, it actually populates into a link there for you, and you, as the invite, all you have to do is click that link and you’d be able to join the meeting, right? You could also use the toll-free number as well, and you’ll have a conference ID every time…a unique conference ID for every meeting that you send out, and you could be able to, you know, join that meeting.

You can also set restrictions here, you know, as to how many people can actually forward that meeting invite, so they don’t actually share with other people that don’t need to be involved in that meeting, right? What else is really cool here is, I can actually do a recurring meeting. So, let’s say I want this meeting to happen once a week, right? So I can set up a time within my schedule that it’s only a half hour meeting that I want to have weekly recurring once a week, right? And I want to have it on a Thursday. I’m not going to set it right now, but basically, the range is all these conditions are met, now you just say, “Okay, that’s great.” And set the meeting. Now, of course, if there’s a recurring meetings, and now you don’t have those recurring meetings anymore, just click on any of those recurring meetings and you can actually change, remove that recurrence as well as edit it. So if you want to just cancel one of those meetings, and not all of the meetings that you’re recurring, just one of the days you’re busy, you can’t attend it, you could also do that, and you just have a tentative, or decline that meeting. And I’ll show you how to do that as well, and it’s the same concept for recurring meeting as well as just regular meetings itself.

Okay. So that’s great. I’m going to set up a meeting. But I don’t really know what Ziad’s schedule looks like. I don’t want to just throw in a meeting and they can come back, and we go back and forth and saying, “Hey, I’m available, I’m not available.” And so, all I’m going to do now is look at the scheduling assistant that pops up right here, and look at what Ziad’s schedules look like, right? So I can see, you know, his entire week’s schedule. I can look at any time that…basically, people have to share these calendars for you to be able to view them, and I’ll show you how we do that as well. Or I could add other people into this meeting as well, right? Let’s say if I want to add somebody, I can look at their schedule and see, okay, what availability do they have, and, you know, based on their availability and my availability combined, we can say, “Okay, look, 8:00 o’clock is a really good time, let’s set the meeting at that time,” or “there’s this half hour slot right here, we can set up a meeting in that time,” right? And then I can send the invite right through here.

Also, on this side here, there’s a room finder panel here as well, that you can fit here. You can actually look at your entire calendar view here as well as any of the conflicts that might occur in those scheduling, right? So as I can see, there’s no conflict here, there’s no conflict this time, and so on and so forth, but there is some conflict, you know, with some of the attendees that are here on these times, right? So you don’t want to have meetings at that time.

Now, let’s say, okay, you know what, I’m not going to send that meeting invite, you know, or let’s say if I do send that meeting invite, I’ll only send it to myself. Let’s remove another person from it. And let’s say I send that meeting invite only to myself, and I say Send, okay? Now, I respond to this meeting, it’ll come up onto my calendar, right? And if I go onto my calendar, you’ll notice a meeting pop up at that time, and I actually just forgot which day I put the meeting invite, but that’s okay, I’ll just click here and I’ll actually put in a new meeting right here, right? And to myself, no problem, I’m going to join with Skype. I don’t need a subject, there you go, send that. And this meeting occurs in the past, which is fantastic because I don’t want to be meeting in the past. Let’s go to tomorrow and send that.

Now, you’ll notice on my calendar, a meeting pops up, that I just created. Now, I can do a whole bunch of different things in that meeting. What I can do is I can track that meeting and/or I can see who has kind of joined that meeting. So if right click here, to all my attendees, I can send an email update, let’s say, “Okay, you know what, guys, make sure you bring your laptops to this meeting.” And send that update, right? I can do that. I can also categorize this email in a particular way, and I can change those settings and categorization as well. So I can say, okay, this is a very important meeting, I have to do this, let’s change that to red, right? And I can a whole bunch of different methods over here as well. I can make that a private meeting. Now, if I do this private meeting, people that I share my calendars with will not be able to see this meeting because it’s now a private meeting or an appointment, right? And I can do the same thing with an appointment, instead of a meeting, let’s say I have a doctor’s appointment. And I can save and close that, doctor’s appointment will pop up, I’ll make that private, and no one can see that. There’s a little lock that comes up. No one else will be able to see that.

Now, as you can see, one of my colleague’s calendar, it just says busy and free, so when she is or she’s not available. Whereas mine, it shows kind of the whole scope of what meeting I’m actually attending and what I’m not attending, at what times I’m free. Now, let’s say if I wanna, you know, have my colleague join a meeting and I want to schedule a time where it works. This little arrow right here turns it into an overlay where you can actually combine the two schedules together and see what times actually work, and you can do that with as many people, or clients, or groups, or teams that you have. All of those are integratable here with this overlay, right? And of course, you can bring that back as well. And let’s not set a set a meeting, but you can see the availability and the white spaces that are there to be able to organize and have that meeting.

Now, within that as well, when I was talking about categories, you can actually set conditions on those categories as well. So let’s say you right-click and to go into, let’s view settings, and go into conditional formatting. Now, I can actually set, so let’s say, I’ve already got one, let’s delete that one. Let’s say I make a new rule, okay, and this rule is going to be rule number one. Every meeting that follows and abides by this conditional formatting, I want it to turn into an orange color, okay? Now, what’s my condition? My condition is, any time a meeting is organized by Ziad, right? Every time it’s organized by Ziad, that’s going to turn orange. Now I’ll go, okay, okay, okay. Now, you see, all these meetings or organized by myself, and therefore they turned orange. Now, that’s really cool because I can do a whole bunch of different…it’s really clean view for me to see, okay, this is great, this is the meetings that I’ve organized, or this is the meeting that I have to attend, these are the meetings that I have to prep certain things. You can actually color code them, and it gives them a nice sort of view than the same color blocks for the time, right? So that’s kind of cool to do that as well.

Now, one other feature that I think is really important to notice within Outlook is the Share Calendar feature. First of all, you can add calendars from the address book, again, these addresses have to be set up on the back-end for you to be able to see other people’s calendars, but you could also share calendars here, right? So I can share my calendar one through here in this way, but what I want to show you is doing it through here. Let’s say I want to email that calendar, right? So, email calendar, came up right there, right? Let’s email that calendar, so it’ll come up to this tab and say, okay, well, who do you want to email this to? Or let’s say, what calendar do you really want to show? So I want to show, you know, my personal calendar, which I, for obvious reasons, just named it calendar. And I want to show them today’s calendar, or tomorrows calendar, or maybe the whole bunch of specific dates or weeks, times, let’s say I only want to show them today’s calendar, okay? So, today the date comes in right here, and now you can see what detail, or how much access you want them to have with your calendar. You only want them to look at my availability times, or limited details, so you can actually see some things and not all the things, right? Or you can have the full details. I want only the availability. Now, I want to be able to show what my working hours are only. So I’m not available, you know, after 5:00, or I’m not available before 8:00, and you can adjust these as well. And once I do that, the calendar invite will come right in here, and now I can actually share that calendar to anybody I would like. And they can see and view what my availability looks like and when they should join me, and even the time zones come in here, right?

On the note of time zones, if you look here on the left side, there’s only one real time zone, you can actually change and have multiple time zones here as well, just so that you can kind of do that. And you can go here into options, which is one of those things I want to show you. There’s general, all these different things that you can look at, we just won’t have time to look at all of them. What I really want to show you is the calendar. So you can set your work times here, you can have, you know, different holiday times here, so I’ve only got the Canadian holidays, but if I want to add in a different country holidays, let’s say I want to put the States holidays, and add that into my calendar, it’ll give me all of the calendars that are in the States, like Remembrance Day, Valentines Day, all this stuff, these are now added into my calendar, right? So I can see what days are holidays, if there are people that are working in other countries as well. And here’s the time zone feature, you can actually add up to three time zones. So let’s say if I work in multiple time zones, or there’s clients that work in multiple time zones. I’m going to go into a second time zone, and I often use the Central time zone or Pacific time zone, you want to add, and you can, you know, just search up different time zones that you’d like, and simply go, okay, and you’ll notice, I’ve changed this to CT, the label. If I could go here, it’ll actually show me the Central Timeline, right? And now I can manage meetings based on what time zone my colleagues are at.

Now, there’s a whole bunch of other things that are really new and cool that are included in Outlook. One of those things is the add-ins that you guys can get. So you can get more add-ins here. The two that I’ve kind of put on to my tabs here are Dynamics 365, as well as My Analytics. This is a new feature that came up just recently, and allows you to kind of personalize the content that you have as well as be able to focus some of your time on the important things and basically categorize what is and what is not as important when you’re doing that. So it’s a really cool way to kind of see and set goals for yourself, and see, okay, this is the priority work. Oftentimes what happens is, there’s all these little things that come on a regular day and you often forget to do, or you don’t deliver the big tasks, or the more important tasks to its full capacity. So it just kind of organizes you, as well it tells you, okay, how much focus time did you have. What percentage of emails. I just don’t have enough data in this inbox to show you, if I had another inbox I’d be able to show you how many hours I was actually working, who I collaborated the most with, what team members, etc, etc, and it shows quite a bit of information here.

One last thing that I want to kind of share with you before we conclude with this demo is this Account Settings tab. Now, this settings tab, you can actually a whole bunch of different things. You can also set different storages here as well, so if you want to, let’s say you want to open or export other documents in certain places, or you want to have it sent to your OneDrive, or your Share Point sites, or anything like that. But what I want to show you is this one, right? And you can add different accounts. But if you go into Account Settings, you can see the different connections that are there. Delegate Access is something that’s really cool. Let’s say I got promoted and I have to hire a secretary or someone to kind of look at my accounts. I don’t have a delegated access right now, make sure you kind of tell somebody that you’re actually using them as delegate. But let’s say I want to make myself a delegate to myself, which is kind of weird, but I add that delegate in, and now I can actually see what they can and cannot see. So, in the calendar, they can read, create, and modify my items. So someone can actually manage my accounts. Or they can have no access to it, right? They can only read items, and so on and so forth, but you can change the access, that’s here, right? They receive a copy of the meetings that are related to me, actually they get it as well, so that way they can notify me or manage my schedule and so on and so forth. Same with tasks, what they can do with my inbox, they can, all these categories are there, so you can change the settings based on how much information you want to share with the delegate and be able to that. Now, it’s probably cool to, you know, let them know that you’re using them as a delegate by sending them a quick summary with all these permissions so that is clear from the get-go. I’m not going to set a delegate, but you can just go okay from there and now they would have all that access that you would need, and of course these would all open up as well for you to see.

So, some really cool features here. There’s a lot more that you can do obviously with Outlook, and of course there’s the online version of Outlook as well that comes into your portal. You can leverage groups, you can leverage a whole bunch of different things, and all of the items would be very, very similar when they populate here as well. So you can look at different groups that are there, and use their events and use their calendars to help, you know, set meetings, and organize yourself in a professional manner in that as well. So, that concludes the rest of my presentation. If there are any questions at this time, feel free to type them out, or send me an email, give me a call, connect with me on Linkedin, and we’d be more than happy to help you out with your office inquiries. Thank you.

Melissa: Awesome, Ziad. I’m just having a look here, see if any questions have come in. Doesn’t look like anything has come in through the chat or the questions for now.

Ziad: Awesome.

Melissa: Okay, great. I’ll be sending out a recording of the webinar to everybody later this afternoon.

Ziad: As well, you guy’s will receive a survey, a quick survey for this webinar. Please do kind of share your thoughts so we can improve this going forward as well. Thank you.

Melissa: Thanks, Ziad.