Your employees can outperform in their roles when they can work together as a team. As a business leader, you want to make it easy using technologies that are proven to work. Office 365’s apps can enable your teams to collaborate from start to finish. Employees can share meeting notes, co-author documents in real time, get updates and access files, so nobody ever misses a beat.

Tips for co-authoring in Word

Collaboration is a key component of Word 2016, and the real-time co-authoring feature gives team members the chance to easily share ideas and give direct comments in the doc.

Get up and running.

To get started using real-time co-authoring, save your Word 2016 document to OneDrive for Business. Next, click the “Share” button, located in the upper right of the window.

Invite colleagues.

Using the Share pane, invite others using their email addresses. They’ll receive an email invitation to edit or view the document.

Enable real-time co-authoring.

Once they’ve signed on, you’ll see a notification in the top-right of your screen. Clicking “Yes” will enable sharing changes and allow everyone to automatically see changes made in the document.

Work together seamlessly.

With everyone in the same document, you and your team can draft, comment and edit your work in real time. Add or reply to comments right next to the text you’re discussing, so your colleagues can follow the conversation.

Excel – Use history to collaborate with confidence

With multiple team members editing spreadsheets in real time, the risk of someone accidentally making a mistake or deleting important data is real. Office 2016’s improved version history lets you see and
revert changes to ensure that nothing is lost.

See document history at a high level.

Open the History pane by clicking File > History. Quickly see when the file was created and when it was last modified at a glance.

See who contributed to a file.

All revisions are listed by date and show the names of people who made the revisions, so you can follow up with anyone regarding their changes.

See how files evolve over time.

Click on a version to open it and examine how it differs from later versions of the same file.

Restore previous versions.

If you want to revert back to an older version that you find, simply select “Restore” and the document will be reverted back to the file as it was at that point in time.

PowerPoint – Putting teamwork front and centre

Collaborate with PowerPoint in Office 2016.

New features improve the experience of working together on a presentation in real time with multiple team members.

Get team visibility.

The top-right corner of the screen shows you who’s working on the file and where they’re working. With one click, you can jump to the slides they’re working on.

Initiate video chats.

By clicking on a person’s thumbnail image and the Skype for Business logo, you can start a group chat to discuss the project you’re collaborating on.

View document activity.

The activity feed shows you a full history of changes made to the document, letting you revert to prior versions if necessary.

Communicate through comments.

Threaded conversations and quick-access buttons let you quickly reply to or resolve comments.

Outlook – New attachment feature tips

The days of digging around for files you want to attach to emails are now gone. With Outlook 2016, sharing files is better with a new and seamless attachment experience.

Choose from recently accessed files.

When attaching a file to an email, all documents that you have recently accessed on any of your devices will appear in a list – from your hard drive and from OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.

Grant permissions before sending.

Doc permissions can be viewed and/or changed when you’re attaching a file

Easily search for files from multiple locations.

With files in various locations, the attachment feature places them all at the same level. It’s
now easier than ever to search for files that you’ve previously attached from OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint – you can search just as you would for any other file.

Two ways to communicate smarter in Skype for Business

Now, with Skype for Business, you can simplify the communication experience by providing a tool that’s both familiar and functional for calling, group conference calls, video and sharing.

Chat to all project collaborators at once.

Need to ask a quick question or clarify a point on a project? While working in Office Online, simply click on the Skype icon in the top-right corner of your screen to initiate a quick group call or video chat with
one or more people.

Don’t miss an opportunity to chat to a customer.

You can now invite customers or even prospects who are non-Skype users to join a meeting or webcast from their browsers or smartphones.

SharePoint – Two things that you probably didn’t know about SharePoint

Never overwrite an edit.

When a document has been “checked out”, no other person can make edits to the document until it has been
checked back in. To enable the “check out” feature for all documents, follow these instructions:
• Go to your document library.
• In the ribbon bar, click Library > Library Settings.
• Under General Settings, select Versioning Settings.
• Under Require Check Out, select “Yes”.

Only reveal changes when you’re ready.

When collaborating on a document, you don’t have to share half-formulated ideas or edits. Your changes or
those by another collaborator won’t be released and viewable until the author saves them.