Microsoft 365 Apps Overview

0:06My name is Simona. Yes that's me. And in this skill, we're talking about apps the Microsoft 365 apps. Well, I say that but at the time of recording this content, Microsoft is going through a bit of a brand refresh where it's rebranding many of its former office 365 offerings as Microsoft 365. Now you will still see office 365 branding for subscriptions that only contain the end user apps and nothing else, and we do absolutely still use the term office to specifically describe those desktop applications such as word and Excel and whatnot.

0:40But don't let the detailed trouble you too much. The only reason why I mentioned it at all is that people ask me, what's the difference between Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and does it matter which one I've got? And the answer is, no, not really. But anyway what do I mean by these apps, well it's things like Teams and Excel and OneDrive and SharePoint and many, many more, including lesser known apps such as sway and planner and delve and gosh, so many more besides. And I suppose I should mention as a bit of a public service announcement that exactly which of these apps you have access to will depend on which Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription that you actually have.

1:22I mean, look if I show you on the Microsoft website, some of these different Microsoft 365 plans as I scroll down, you can see some of the same app logos from that slide I just showed you and which plan includes them. And if I go to the Office 365 plans, let me just scroll up a bit, there we go you can see again look which plans include which apps. Now, I do not expect you to care too much about the detail here. I just want it noted that you might not have access to all of the apps that we talk about in this course.

1:54So my goodness how on Earth do we go about learning some of this stuff? Well, in this overview skill first things first, we'll see where you have to actually go to find the apps that you have available, and we'll take a look around the Office 365 portal, and then we'll spend a couple of minutes on each of a handful of some of the lesser known apps such as planner and sway and whatnot. And so that is this skill. But some of the other apps like Teams and Outlook for the web and whatnot are somewhat more heavyweight beasts, and also a much more widely used, and so I've decided that they deserve their own dedicated skills within this course.

2:30And I do expect you to cherry pick what you watch here for example, if you use the traditional desktop application for Excel and never the browser-based version then I don't necessarily expect you to watch the Excel for the web skill because I've got a whole other separate courses on those full desktop applications for the traditional office products such as Outlook and Word and Excel and PowerPoint. Oh dear, I wanted to explain this. So that you didn't get overwhelmed by the content, but I fear I've kind of made it overwhelming, but here trying to give you the summary here, there is potentially an awful lot to learn but honestly please just pick the videos, which are aligned to the products that you want to learn about.

3:08And with that, let's get started.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] It's not uncommon for people to say to me, well, I know I've got Excel and Word, and PowerPoint and Outlook installed on my computer. And I know how to get to my email on the web. But I don't know if I've got any of those other apps. And, of course, the answer depends-- as we saw in the last video on exactly what licenses have been purchased for you. But here's the thing. There's just one easy web address for you to remember-- and that's office.com.

0:30Now you can see I'm using the Microsoft Edge browser, but you do get a very good experience in other browsers as well. For example, it's pretty seamless in Google Chrome-- but anyway, just go to office.com. And the idea is, you're going to be signing in using your work email address. So let me just paste in the address of the account that I use in my demo environment. And then, of course, you need to put in your password. And this will load what I'm describing as the Office 365 portal. It's a home page of Office 365. And this contains all of the end user stuff of your Microsoft 365 or your Office 365 subscription.

1:05And what you're looking at on the screen here, may or may not be exactly the same as what your environment looks like. But the broad components should be similar. So down the left hand side, you can see there are shortcuts to the different apps that you have available. So, for example, there's the Outlook icon. If I click that, that takes me to Outlook on the web, through another browser window and other tab here. And actually this is interesting, because when people say to me, well, I already get my email on the web, they may be familiar with this. But may not have spotted that look, there's this App launcher button at the top corner here, and that will take you to your other apps or click this button and that will take you back to that portal.

1:42But I do have quite a few spare tabs open, so let me just close those and get back to the one we were at. So yes, shortcuts down the side or use the App launcher, your choice. And then the main part of the screen is going to give you shortcuts and different things that you've interacted with recently. So I've got this recommended bar across the top. So I can scroll through that. And this is going to give me things that I've recently edited or files I've recently opened. And if there are things on this list that you think, oh, well, that's a bit odd-- this random presentation here-- I don't even think that was a file that I wanted to save. Then you can choose to not have it displayed in this recommended list.

2:15So you can be sure to keep this part relevant. And then you'll also see down here I've got a list of files that I have recently interacted with, and these might not be files stored in my bits of cloud storage. They could be stored on my Onedrive or it could be from other SharePoint document libraries. They may be files that I have recently looked at that other people have edited and/or maybe files that I have shared recently. But I do like this Activity column. You can filter it by files that have had recent comments or edits or where you have been particularly mentioned, so that can be quite useful.

2:46And also this Search at the top-- now if you just click in there you'll get an idea of the sorts of things you can search. So you can search for apps, or you can search your files or your people, or even your SharePoint sites. So, for example, maybe I want to see if I've got the Sway app. Well, I just started typing Sway and sure enough there as the app. Or maybe I want to do a search for a particular file. I'm sure I had an agenda somewhere-- it will pop up with those files. You also might have this Install Office button just here. Of course, Office is word Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. And you might think, well, why have I got that button when I've got these shortcuts down the left hand side.

3:19Well, these shortcuts down the side are for the web versions of these products. Now using Microsoft Word in the browser, using Excel in the browser-- not the locally installed applications. Whereas this button here, will give you the ability-- again, depending on exactly what flavor of Microsoft 365 or Office 365 you've got, but you may well have the option to also install the full locally installed desktop applications. And in fact, it is quite useful to go ahead and have a look at this Other install options part of the menu, because that will take you into part of your account-- where you can, Install Office.

3:54But also look, you can view the apps and devices you're using Office on, because you can actually Install Office on up to five PCs, if your license allows it. And if you click that, you get to see exactly what devices you have already installed it on. Now interestingly, you can see for this demo account I haven't got any installations of Microsoft Office. There's nothing listed under devices. That's because, I'm using my CBT Nuggets account for my actual local installations of PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel-- I haven't used any of the licenses that come with this demo environment.

4:27But anyway, if I just take ourselves back to that home screen back to that portal, you'll also see top rightish. I've got a few settings that I can play with. For example, the Themes-- that's the look of the portal. You might find your organization does customized slightly with a banner across the top. There like this demo environment or it might be just a standard Microsoft Office one, or you can choose-- well, let's just expand this you could choose a fancy pattern-- whatever you like. You've also got the option to use dark mode if you prefer. I'm not really a dark mode kind of person, but that certainly is a useful option for many us, and, for example, you could change your password.

5:01So a few options there that are worth knowing about. But I think that's enough of a look at the portal. Let's crack on and start exploring some of those apps.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Let's begin our little tour of some of the Microsoft 365 apps with Planner. And I'm sure the name suggests to you that this is all about planning things. And this is Microsoft's description-- a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork, by providing a hub for team members to create plans and assign tasks. And as we'll see that is a good description. But if you've got project management experience, you might be thinking-- assigning tasks that sounds like a project management software function for which we would normally-- from the Microsoft line up of products, be considering Microsoft Project.

0:40And so, of course, that does leave us to ponder. Well, what is the difference then between Planner and Project? And the answer very much comes down to cost and functionality with Microsoft Planner being available at no extra cost in most of the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscriptions. Whilst Microsoft Project requires the purchase of an extra subscription. And that's because, it's a comprehensive project management solution with resource planning, and budgeting, and reporting, and program, and portfolio management too.

1:11While Planner, is designed very much to simply help us organize teamwork and it's easy enough to use right out of the box. So let's have a look. Of course, we're going to launch the Planner app from your portal. So I'm just going to click on the App launcher button. And because I've used it recently, it's appearing on the list for me here, but you might have to click All apps in order to find Planner. But, of course, we choose that. That's going to load. And notice that it's showing you what we call the Planner hub. This is going to give you an overview of all of the plans that you are a part of. So you can see, I've already got a few plans here.

1:42But we are going to create a brand new plan together, so you can see how it works. So over on the left hand side-- if you choose New plan. And then you need to give it a name. So let's imagine we've got some Product Launch event that we're planning as part of this fictitious company I use for my demos. And I also need to decide how private or public I want this to be. So I'm going to choose Public, because I am happy for anybody in my organization to see this plan. But I could make it more private, if I preferred. But let's go ahead and create that plan. And that will create a new object, a new plan in my Planner hub and it's taken me straight to it.

2:12There we go Product launch. And you can always click the name of the plan if you want to, for example, change the colors, the background that's used. Or to change the privacy settings or add a description, or to control notifications. But also did you notice, on the General tab right down at the bottom there, that's how you would delete a plan. And it might seem a bit premature for me to be showing you this one we've only just created it. But, of course, if you're just playing around with me and you want to try something out then you can do confidently, knowing that you can get rid of it afterwards. But anyway, the first thing we need to do is add a few tasks. So I'm going to click this Add task button.

2:43And the first task is to choose the venue. So I'm just going to type in a task name and then hit Enter, that has put the task on my task list and given me the ability to start typing another task. You'll notice that I could have been setting due dates and assigning these tasks, but I'm going to come back to that later. So I'm just going to quickly fast forward through me hammering in a few tasks here for this fictitious Product Launch. So I'm literally just typing the task name, pressing Enter, type the next task press Enter. That's a nice quick way of entering in a list of tasks. If I just click in a blank area, then you can see there's the task list that I've created-- quite a few of them there.

3:16And at any time I can go back into these to add more detail. Now I could do that by clicking the little more options button. For example, I could assign the task to somebody else or add a label to a task, we'll see that and actually in a second. Or you can actually just click the Task itself to open it up, and see all sorts of things that we can do. So yes, I'm going to assign this to somebody. So let me assign it to one of my colleagues, Lee. So I'm going to choose, Lee from the internal address book, and it says, oh, do you want to assign the task and add user to the plan? Yes, I will. So let's assign that and add Lee.

3:46So now this task is assigned to Lee. But now let's add a label. So let's imagine this particular task is a marketing task. So I think, oh, well, let's say let's choose a color for our marketing tab. Let's choose red, so I'm going to edit that to make sure that it's not called red it's called marketing, press Enter. And yes, I'm just going to choose that to assign it. And I could assign multiple labels as you saw. We'll come back to buckets in a second, but let's imagine Lee, has already started choosing the venue. So this task is in progress, and it is quite an important task. I'm not too worried about the start date on this occasion, but we have decided that we really do need to have chosen the venue by the end of this week.

4:19So let me put in a due date there. And, of course, I can add a little description or add some notes in here. I could choose whether to have those notes showing on the card-- that's the actual object on the board over here, but I don't think I do want that. But I could also add some Checklist items. Now this becomes useful-- if you have a task on your task list that's rather a big task, so you could break it down into individual items. So you would just click an item there. So maybe we're going to be inspecting Hotel Amelie. And let me just fast forward adding on a few more items to this particular checklist for this task.

4:49And then, of course, we would check the ones that we've done. So it's almost like well subtasks within this main task. I can Add attachments to this as well. So let me just pick up, for example, or I don't know let's just pick up a picture from my computer. So if I just go into my pictures folder, yep, there's a nice picture the venue that we might be using. And if you do pick up a picture, then it can be quite nice to show that on the card, because it does look quite nice. You can just see it in the background there. And then any other comments. So this is where maybe me and Lee, because I've assigned this task to Lee, could have a bit of a conversation here. So I might be saying something like, can the inspection reports be shared with the team.

5:23I've added that comment and you could imagine that Lee could add another comment as well. But if I just click outside of that box to complete all of that, you'll see that, that task is now much more fleshed out. It's got its marketing label, there's the picture. I can see that it's important, that it's in progress. It's got a due date two of the seven subtasks have been completed and it's been assigned to Lee. And of course, we would flesh out these other tasks in a similar fashion. But one thing that I really love about Planner, is this idea of buckets. So you can see-- it's already given us bucket called To do.

5:55So that's this first column. And you can rename that if you wanted to call it something else, but I'm happy with that. And then you add other buckets, other columns to determine-- usually the status of the task. So you might want to have the To do list and then in progress, and then complete and then signed off or you could use these buckets as categories. Anything you like. So I am going keep the To do bucket, but I'm going to add another bucket, which is going to be called On track. So therefore, any tasks which are currently in progress and they're on track, I'm going to move into that bucket. Let's add another bucket called At risk.

6:26So maybe there are some tasks that we are a little bit worried about. So maybe the PR activities, aren't going too well. Maybe we're having trouble with the AV equipment rental. And let's just add one more for tasks, which are blocked for whatever reason. But you can see how useful it becomes being able to organize your tasks by these different columns, these buckets. And when you've got tasks that have been marked as complete. Well, you just click the little button there to say, yes, that's done. That'll then be collapsed into a separate little list here in that bucket called completed tasks.

6:56And for me, 9 times out of 10 I work with Planner in this Board view, but you're also see at the top here, we've got a Charts view. This will give you really good real time information about the tasks-- which haven't yet been started, and the ones which are in progress. And the number of tasks in each bucket and different priorities and Whatnot. So all sorts of insights you can get there. But also the Schedule view. If you had filled in all of those dates, the start date, the due date, then they would show in this Schedule view here. And you remember, we've only put a due date on one of our tasks. But let's imagine we think, well, the keynote speech planning, we're planning on doing that this week.

7:30You can drag it onto the schedule and indicate, oh, we're going to be doing that through that week there. And that will now-- if I go into that particular task, have assigned that start and end date according to the dates that I dragged it on the calendar. So it's a really, really nice user interface. And then, of course, by the time you've got lots of tasks, with lots of different labels, and people assigned to them and different priorities and whatnot, then the filtering will be useful. Maybe you want to see all of the late tasks or maybe the important tasks, or maybe all of the tasks assigned to a particular person. Or maybe all of the tasks that are marketing tasks, then my goodness, you get a lot of insight by using those filters.

8:06Brilliant. Now I did promise you this can only be a quick overview. So hopefully that's given you an idea of how it works. But I have two bits of homework for you, if you are interested. Firstly, this button here will give you a few more options. In particular, you can add a plan to your Outlook calendar. So if your life is ruled by your Outlook calendar and you want to see these tasks in your calendar, then you can work through a few options to do that there. And also something I really, really love-- look at the bottom left hand corner, you can get the Planner app on your device.

8:37This means you can use your phone, your iPad-- whatever it is, to see your plans, to see those tasks. And when your team really does start using Planner a lot, you'll find that there are lots of plans. So we know that they're all gathered together on the Planner hub. But also look at this over on the left hand side My tasks. That's where you see all of the tasks assigned to you across the different plans. It saves you from having to go in and out of all of those separate plans to try and work out which tasks have been assigned to you. You can see them all in a single view here. It's a really nice app. I do urge you and your team, to give it a go.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] There is nothing I like more than checking something off a list. I really am a to-do list kind of person. It helps me to structure my work, and it gives me great satisfaction to work through the tasks on a list. But, hang on a minute. Haven't we've just been talking about tasks in that Planner app in the last video? And yes, there is potential for an overlap here. But in a nutshell, think of Planner as the tool for organizing teamwork, and To Do as the app for organizing your own day, your own to-do list.

0:35Let me show you. Now, if you've been using Microsoft Office in your work environment for a long time, you might be used to using Outlook to manage your tasks. And indeed, what you're looking at here is the Outlook desktop application. And if I just go down to the bottom left hand corner there and go into Tasks, you can see that I do have a few tasks on my Outlook list. So for example, I really must ring my mother today. And also, it does always amuse me that these tasks have been hanging around on my demo environment for many years now. So my poor dog, she probably is due a walk having not clearly had one since 2014.

1:06But anyway, that is the Outlook application. Hold that thought, because I'm now going to take us back to our Office 365 portal. And as you might guess, there is a To-do App, which you can get to from the app launcher. Again, you might have to search for it through all apps. But actually, rather than launching it from here, from this home screen, look over towards the right hand side. There's a button here that will help you plan your day. And when you click that, what it's going to do, it's going to bring in some content from Outlook, you can see the logo there, including various meetings and whatnot.

1:39And also, this task due today, that's the Ring Mom task that you saw a second ago. Great. So let's bring in stuff from Outlook. But also, look at the top here. That's the calendar. If I go to To Do, then it's going to bring in those same tasks that you saw a second ago in the Outlook desktop application, including those really old tasks there. So there is some direct integration there with Outlook tasks and the To Do app. But look at the bottom right hand corner. This is really good. If I choose to manage all tasks, this is going to be incredibly useful.

2:11Because we saw in the last video that in Planner, other people had assigned tasks to me. And I think, well, how does that integrate with my Outlook task list? Well To Do is the answer. So look down the left hand side. We've got My Day, which we'll come back to. We've got Important tasks. But also look, Planned tasks. Those might be any tasks that have got a due date so that they can be arranged when they are due. And you can see those really old tasks just there. But also look, Assigned To Me, for example, from Planner. So these are some of the same tasks that we saw before in the Planner video.

2:44I can also have Flagged Email showing here, and also look, again, those are those four Outlook tasks that we saw. But let's just go back to my day because I absolutely love this. This Is going to help me plan today. What am I going to do today? And over on the right hand side, To Do is suggesting for me what tasks I might want to add on to my list for today. So I think, yes, I really ought to ring my mom. And, yes, my poor dog really ought to get a walk today. So you can see I'm adding particular things to-do today. And maybe I think, yes, I really should book my flights.

3:14So I'm adding these tasks from the other parts of To Do onto my day. And at any time I can right click on any of these to remove them from my day or to mark them as important or complete or change the due date or whatever, you get the idea. But I can also add additional tasks. So there might be a task that doesn't yet appear on any other list that I do want to do today. So let's imagine I'm involved in some trainer recruitment and I'm going to be participating in a trainer interview. So I need to prepare for that. So I just type that in and press Enter. And now notice that when I click on a task, that panel over on the right hand side, which previously showed me suggestions of things to add to my day, that's now showing me detail for the selected task.

3:53So, this task here for example, has come from a plan in Planner whereas this one here was the one that I just added. So, yeah. That's been added to my day. I might want to set a reminder so yes, please remind me later on today. Maybe I want to add a due date, I really must get this done by tomorrow because the interview is tomorrow. It's not a repeating task. I can add a category. Now you'll notice that the categories are colored. The named categories are ones that I have worked on in Outlook. So if I had already renamed my categories in Outlook then they will shine through here. So this is an Admin task, for example.

4:25I could have multiple categories but that'll do for now. I can also add a file. So maybe I've got a copy of the trainer's CV or resume to look at. So I'm going to attach that to this task. So that's useful. And I can also add any extra notes down here. Now I must admit I quite often use this to copy and paste any text that's come from a chat message. So, maybe my co-worker said to me, oh will you join the trainer interview later on today? It's the second interview for her to meet the team, blah, blah, blah. So I might just copy and paste that information directly into there.

4:55But look at the top. I can also add steps for this particular task. And this really appeals to my sense of structuring my work and marking things off when I've completed them. So this allows me to add subtasks, a bit like the checklist that we saw in the last video. So, for example, maybe I do need to review her CV. Let me press Enter and add another one. I need to watch the sample videos that she submitted, and I also need to prepare some questions for the interview. Of course, once you've completed a task, so let's imagine I finally taken my poor dog for a walk, I can check the little box there.

5:26It'll give you a little satisfying ding sound which, you won't have heard because that would have gone in through via headphones. But it's shown there as completed. And this one remember, that had several steps. If I had completed one of those steps, and I can mark off individual items that I have completed within that overall task. You can also add a whole new list. So over on the left hand side here let me just add a new list. So let's imagine I need to do some shopping for a Team Offsite. So, it's going to be a bit of a grocery list here. So a shopping list. Let's add some items. So, eggs, bacon, let's imagine we're going on a camping trip or something so, teabags.

5:57You get the idea. And what I really like about this is I can share lists with other people. So top right hand corner this time, I could invite them to look at this list. And this is going to be useful in my situation. I've written the list of things we need for the Team Offsite Event, but I might want somebody else to actually go and do that shopping. So, great that I can share that list with them. So I think you can say that To Do does bring together all of the tasks from different places where I might have had tasks assigned to me or tasks from Outlook. But do remember right at the beginning of this video, I showed you the tasks that I had in the Outlook desktop client.

6:30And sure enough, it is synchronized back from the To Do app into Outlook. Because we can see that yes, I've marked off that I've taken the dog for a walk. And I've got this new task that has appeared. So synchronization works both ways. But also, if you look more closely at the left hand navigation panel in To Do, it seems to think that I'm in Outlook. Now this would be Outlook for the web this time because I'm in the browser. And indeed, if you look down the bottom well, that's obviously the tasks part of Outlook and, this here is my email. So if you go to your email in Outlook for the web, and go into your tasks, and you might think to yourself, well that's just going to be the same as going to Outlook tasks through the desktop application.

7:07Well actually, if you click on Tasks in Outlook for the web, it takes you to what we've just been looking at the To Do app. So the integration is really nice. And much like Planner, there is also a really lovely mobile app. You can see my iPhone here, and there's the To Do App. So if I just tap that to go into it, sure enough, you can see the same items on the list. And I don't know if you just saw briefly there, the shopping list synchronizing itself. So let me just start off with the My Day item. And you can see those same things that we saw a second ago in the app itself.

7:39Let me just tap back and, there we go. Let's take a quick look at that shopping list. Fantastic. I love it.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] The next Microsoft 365 app I'd like us to look at, is Microsoft Lists. And while I know, you know what a list is. I'm imagining that you might be thinking really. The world's gone mad. Haven't, we just spent the last two videos talking about lists? Planner is a list of teamwork tasks. To do is my list of things to do, and you're telling me there's another app called Microsoft Lists? Well, yes, I am.

0:30And this orange stripy thing here is its little logo. But yes, lists is all about creating a list for tracking all kinds of information. And this is why I decided to create this apps overview skill, because there are so many Microsoft 365 apps. It can get confusing, as to when you would use which. But anyway, let me give you some context here for the Microsoft Lists app. If you've ever heard of Airtable, then Microsoft Lists fulfills very similar use case scenarios. But Airtable, is a competitor to Lists. It's been around for much longer and contains more functionality at the time of recording.

1:03Although if you've never heard of Airtable, then you probably don't care too much about all of that. But you might be familiar with SharePoint. And if so, you might be thinking, well, hasn't SharePoint got Lists? And yes, you would be right. And indeed SharePoint lists, was the foundation of Microsoft Lists. The SharePoint list functionality evolved to give us Microsoft Lists. Now we will talk more about SharePoint and other time. But if you're not familiar with SharePoint, then don't worry, because I bet that you've at least seen a List that lives in a spreadsheet application-- like Excel, for example.

1:35Because spreadsheets are really good at sorting and filtering lists. In fact, let me show you one which will form the basis of our example in this video. You can see I'm in Excel for the web, and this is some kind of Issues Log for our Studio Engineering Team. So everything that needs fixing or installing or maintaining gets listed here as an issue. I've got different priorities and statuses assigned to all of these. And as I said, spreadsheets are very good at sorting and filtering. So if I wanted to sort this list to show the oldest outstanding issue first, I can sort by largest on the days old column.

2:07Or if I want to sort it by priority, then that means I get to see all of the critical priority items listed together. And you'll also notice that I've got a column here for the stakeholder email address. So that's the email address of the individual, who's got the biggest vested interest in the issue. And that's useful to have to hand, because it means if the status changes or if you've got a question on an issue, then we know who to email. So as an Excel spreadsheet, that's in a shared area in the cloud. And I've set permissions, so that the engineering team can all work on this and we can all add comments and whatnot to explain what's going on.

2:38That kind of work is OK. But it's going to work even better in Microsoft Lists. So I'm going to go back to the Office 365 portal. And as you've come to know-- if we go to the apps launcher, now I've got lists already on the list there. But you might have to go to all apps in order to find it, but let me go to Lists. And I've already got a few lists in place here, but what we're going to do, we're going to create a brand new List together. So at the top here, just click New list. And this is interesting, you'll see straight away at the top, you could create a brand new Blank list or look at this.

3:09You could bring in an existing list from Excel, because I do think it is really quite likely that in some scenarios-- a bit like my issues logged there that you saw in Excel, that we've already made a start on something in Excel. And you can absolutely pick up the appropriate file from Excel and then bring that into Lists and work on it from there. So you could do that, but actually what I'd like us to do is have a look at some of these templates, because this is brilliant when you're learning about a new tool, because it gives you all sorts of examples as to how you could use these things. So, for example, maybe an asset manager.

3:40It's showing you here what fields, what columns are already in place for you to start filling in. So it's got pictures, and asset tags, and the status, and manufacturer, and all sorts there, or maybe a recruitment tracker. This is great for giving you ideas as to how you could use Microsoft Lists. What about the work progress tracker? So obviously, to pick a template and use it then you would just click the button down here use template. So for us, let's start off with the Issue tracker. We're going to create a new log from scratch, using the same concept that we just saw in the spreadsheet. But we are going to create a new one from scratch using the template.

4:11So I'm going to click Use template. Let's give it a name, or I think I'm going to call it Issue log rather than Issue tracker. I could put a description in there. I could choose a color-- I think a dark green will be nice and then I could choose an icon. So yes, I think the little bug icon will do just nicely. And then I create that list. Now that obviously will then appear as another item in Microsoft Lists and it's taken me straight into there. So it's got all of the column headings already set up ready for me to add a new entry to that list. But before I do that, I might want to make a few changes to this list.

4:43So I'm just going to close down this information panel over on the right hand side here. And I can see there are a couple of columns which I don't really need. So if you click on the dropdown there, you've got some options here within column settings, and we'll be looking at some of these options. But for this one, I'm going to go into Edit and I'm going to say, right at the bottom, nope, I don't need this column at all I'm going to delete it and yes, I am absolutely sure. And you will also notice if I just go into the same option here for Images. If you didn't want to delete it, you just wanted to hide it. You could do that instead. So maybe I think, well, I might want an Images column, I'm not really sure if I need it right now.

5:15So for now I'm going to hide it. And let's Apply that. So I've just changed the view, so we don't see that image column anymore. But I might want to make other changes, so it's easy to change the width of the columns there. I can change the position of the columns-- I can just click and drag to move them around if I want to. But I do want to make some changes to the Status column. So I'm going to go back into Edit again. And this time you'll see well, it's already got lots of properties set for this column, because, of course, we based it on the template-- including look. These are the different choices of statuses that the user can pick from.

5:47Now we don't use those terms in our organization, so of course, we're going to want to change these. So if there are a few that we don't want. So I'm going to get rid of some of these and even that one. And I'm going to add another choice. I'm going to add one that's going to be Pending, and I get to choose the color-- I think perhaps a nice blue would be a good color there. And you'll see there's also this checkbox here can add values manually. That means the user can enter in a different term other than those four status types there. Well, no, I don't want them to be able to do that, they can only pick from one of those four statuses. And also what do I want the Default value to be? Well, I want it to be Pending.

6:18So it's actually easier to edit from the template rather than creating a brand new column from scratch. But look at the top here, learn more about column, types, and options-- as you might imagine, there is a lot of help information available to help you understand what you can do with all of this. But anyway, let me click Save down the bottom here. And I'm also going to make a change to date reported. So if I just go back into that same Edit option there, because I want to set the Default value to be Today's date. And also actually, this is interesting use calculated value. That's how the days old column gets populated-- today's date minus the date it was reported.

6:53And again, you can see there's some help there to understand how to use these formulas and the proper syntax, and some good examples. So do use the help available. But anyway let me click Save to that change that I also made. But I also need to add another column for the stakeholder. So over towards the right hand side here, I can add a column, and it gives me all of the different column types available. Well, this is going to be a Person. Name of the column, so yes-- Stakeholder. Then the Description-- what Type of field is it? Well, yes, it's a Person or a Group. And I'm going to say, Yes, please do Show profile pictures.

7:24There are a few other options here. Some people add multiple stakeholders-- that might be useful, is it a compulsory field that sort of thing? I think that will do us for now though. So let me click Save and that should have added that extra column over on the right hand side there. Good. Looking at the top, left hand corner, I think we're ready to add our first issue to this log. So clicking the New button. This gives us a form with all of those fields. So let's put in the Issue names. So let's imagine it's a Camera fault. And put in the Description-- I've already got something on my clipboard, so I'll just paste that in. And I need to set a Priority.

7:55So let's imagine it's just normal priority. Remember, we had a default status, which was pending-- that'll do for now. Who's it going to be Assigned to? Well, let me pick up the name of a fictitious engineer in my demo environment. The Date reported? Yes, look that defaulted to today, that was what we set. You'll notice that the image field is still there, even though it's not showing in this view, because remember we only hid it from that view. The Issue was logged by? Let's imagine it was logged by me-- there we go. And who is the Stakeholder? Let me put in another name there which is Joni. I haven't got any associated files that I want to add, but I can go back in afterwards if I need to.

8:29But for now, let's click Save. So you'll see that first row has appeared there. And rather than sitting there watching me type in and other 10 issues, you can see I've just fast forwarded to give us a few more entries here to play with. And if you want to edit anything. So you can see I've got a couple of gaps here, where it wasn't filled in quite properly, so you can just double click on an issue to open up that form again. So this one didn't have a priority, so let me just mark that as normal priority. It'll save it automatically and I can just click away to close that window. Or you may choose to Edit this in grid view so look at the buttons up at the top of the screen.

9:00If I choose to Edit in grid view-- that means, I can click directly into the cell I want to edit. So let's assign this particular issue to Lee, good. And then once I finished editing in grid view, I may choose to Exit grid view. And I'm back to how I was. And I can also make further changes to my columns and Whatnot if I want to. So let's imagine this Associated files column, I'm not sure if I need that. And I'm also thinking I should really have some sort of tracking ticket number, some sort of unique ID. So I'm just going to click on the dropdown here, choose Column settings, choose Show and hide again.

9:32Firstly, in order to hide that Associated files column. But the easiest way to add a unique ID to your list, is just a turn on the default ID field. Now that's always going to be there. It's not normally showing. But if you want an ID, you can show it and you can also change the position of it-- either with the arrows or just click and drag it. Let's put it up here, for example, just the second one on the list, and Apply that-- and yes, good. The Associated files column is no longer showing and I've now got this ID column, but I can make that much narrower. Perfect.

10:02We do have a few really nice tools within Microsoft List. I mean, sure we can export this information to Excel-- if we had particularly numerical values that we wanted to create a pivot table or something from, yes, we can do that. But rather more interesting are these options here that allow us to do much more clever integrated things. So, for example, I'm going to create a business rule that says, every time the status changes, I want the stakeholder for that issue to be alerted, and that is really easy to do. So rather than in Excel, I just had the email address there for convenience really.

10:35If I needed to email the stakeholder, but I can automate it here. So let's say, I'm going to notify somebody when a column changes. So which column? One is when the Status column changes, send an email to-- well it's going to be to, the Stakeholder. Let me create that. That rule is now switched on. Obviously, I could then create another one, but that will do us for now. So that does mean if I were to change the status, that would just double click and change that from Pending to-- oh, my goodness it's blocked. Then an email will automatically be sent to Joni to tell her, that the Camera fault issue, Status has changed to Blocked.

11:09Really powerful. You can sort your list by clicking on the dropdown here and choosing to sort A to Z or to filter by certain items on that list, so you can do all of that. Also up here where it says All Items, you can choose to have items grouped and Whatnot. You can just have a Gallery view if you want. So lots of different ways of viewing your list. But also, did you notice that this particular view that obviously we inherited from the template, has obviously got some kind of conditional formatting on there, because this blocked entry-- well, as soon as I change the Status to Blocked, then it made the whole entry go red.

11:41So this is conditional formatting, whereby the appearance of the row there, depends on the value in a cell. So as soon as I change something to blocked it goes red. So if you go back up to here, and choose to Format the current view, this is where you will see. I've already got some conditional formatting applied. So if I manage the rules there, and have a look at it, that's what the template already had. And I'd like that. So if the Status is equal to Blocked, then make it go red. Fantastic. Now you can also share your lists, of course. So again, up on the little row of buttons here, I can click Share, and I can identify different editing permissions.

12:16So either they can just view only or they can add, edit, or remove items, so entries on the List or Issues. Or they can actually start meddling with the columns and the views, so there are different levels of editing that you might want to set for people. So that's worth bearing in mind. But also look at this. You can share individual items. So that little button there, just next to the name of the issue there, means that I can share just that item with somebody and give them editing rights to it. And once you are starting to collaborate with people, then you can add Comments, and that's where we really start collaborating on these lists.

12:49So I love the way this works. You can see there is a comments there. So it's got one comment there's a little icon. And although there is, of course, more to learn about Microsoft Lists-- that'll do for a quick overview.

0:00[MUSIC PLAYING] Microsoft Forms is all about gathering information. So you build a form to create surveys, and quizzes, and polls. And the great thing is you instantly see the results as people fill in the form. And as you've come to expect from this skill, we're going to try a quick example together just to give you the idea. As you might expect, you find it on the Apps launcher. You might have to go to All Apps of course, but I've got it already on the recently accessed list.

0:30And you'll see at the top here I get the opportunity to create a New Form. I've also got a couple of forms that I had already created, and notice you can also create quizzes. Now the main difference between a form and a quiz is that with a quiz, you're indicating what the right answer is, and also assigning points value to the questions. Whereas with just a normal survey, there's no right answer and there are no points. So if you wanted to create a quiz instead of a form, then you will choose the option from the dropdown there, but the broad structure of how you create them is very similar. So we're just going to create a straightforward form. So let's imagine we're looking for some feedback from some recent training sessions we've done.

1:02So I'm going to call it Training Feedback. And we can enter in a description here, so I've just got something in my clipboard which I shall pop in. And you'll notice I've got the opportunity to add some new questions. That's the whole point. This is going to enable me to add the questions. But look at this, I can get some suggestions. Now because I used a word like training in the title of my form here, it's giving me some really good suggestions. How could the training or workshop be improved? How likely are you to recommend it? Were are your expectations met? So you could just say, yes that looks great, I'm going to add them all, but no. We're going to create our own questions.

1:34So let me get rid of those suggestions. And the first question type I'm going to create is a Choice. Now you can see there are different question types and choices. One of the most common ones, you can click the dropdown there to see some other question types like rank the following in order of importance. Or what about this one? This is where the little information bubble is helpful here. Use this to gauge attitudes and opinions about a topic. You might have statements and ask the respondent to indicate how much they resonate with each statement for example. But anyway, I'm going to stick with a straightforward choice. So I'm going to ask them, which type of Excel session did you attend?

2:05And I'm going to give them some options here. So maybe we ran a half day classroom session. Maybe we ran an online session. And let's add another one because maybe we also provided some self-paced learning. So you can see, it's easy to add extra options. I could delete them if I change my mind. I can change the order of them. So I can just click and drag that up to the top, if I would rather that was up there. You can also see that because I chose Choice, that the buttons are those little round buttons, if I want to enable them to choose multiple answers and it changes to those checkboxes. But no, in this situation they're only allowed to choose one.

2:35So I'm going to turn off Multiple Answers. Let me add a new question. This time it's going to be asking them to choose a date. So I'm going to say to them, on what date did you attend your training? And I can see I got a little message here about Branching, we'll come back to that in a second. But for this particular question, because I chose the date type, the respondent is going to get a little calendar picker thing to choose their date, and I could indicate whether that's a required question or not. But I'm going to add another one. Again just a straightforward choice. I'm going to ask them if they'd like any more training on Microsoft Office. And I've got some suggested options here.

3:06And I'm thinking, yeah, that's perfect. I'm going to have a straightforward Yes and No option there. And let me add just one more, but you get the idea. You could carry on adding all sorts of different question types. But I'm going to add a free text type question this time. I'm going to ask them, OK well, what further training would you be interested in? And that's just going to be a free text field there. But notice, I only want question number four here to appear if they say Yes at question three, because if they say No, then that's a bit silly to have that question appearing. And this is all about branching.

3:36So I'm going to click back on that Yes/No, would you like any more training, and click the little more settings button here, and choose Add Branching. Because I'm going to say if the respondent says Yes to this, I want them to go to the next question. But if they say No, I want them to go to the end of the form. Let me just go back, having completed that. And you'll see that all of these questions, I can go back in and edit them, I can change the order of them, I can move them around, I can add extra questions. But the next thing I want to do is just take a quick look at the Theme. So you can see I've got a generic sort of greenie color here.

4:08That's the Microsoft Forms logo color. But towards the top right-hand corner let me click Theme. So you could choose all sorts of interesting ideas here, your choice. And if you scroll down a bit, you could just choose a solid color, or even add some customization by bringing in your own color schemes or adding your own pictures. But anyway, I'm going to choose that sort of green color because that does look rather like an Excel sort of color. But now let's preview this form. So if I click Preview up at the top here, this is how it's going to look to the end user, to the respondent. So what type of Excel training session did they attend?

4:39It was the 1/2 day classroom session? On what date did you attend the training? Good, look there's the date picker, so it was last week or whatever. Would you like any more training? Now notice I can't yet see the question that says, well what training would you like, until I say, Yes. And then sure enough, it pops up inviting me to put in what I'd like further training on. I'm going to submit that. And notice, that even though I was just previewing, that has actually been recorded as a response. Because look, I've now got one response, and if I click that, I can see that response that I just filled in. So I've got one response.

5:11It took me 33 seconds on average to complete that. And notice, look I can click this here to delete responses at this stage, because if I'm just practicing, I might not want these dummy ones. But I'm just going to click Preview again, because I've also got the opportunity to see how it's going to look on a mobile device. And again, if I just fill this in, and let me just again put in some more dummy answers. This time I'll say, No, so I don't get that other question popping up. So my branching is working well. And submit that. So of course, if I go back, I've now got two, responses. And now I've got multiple responses.

5:41If I click View Results I get the opportunity to flick through with these arrows, respondents number one and number two, and I can see the name there. Obviously, they're both in my name, because it was me just playing around. But again, I can delete individual responses if I want to get rid of the ones that I was just testing with. Because what's rather nice, this summary will give you the overview of the responses. So you don't want any testing responses to skew what's shown in the summary here. And if you want to further analyze the responses, then yeah, go ahead and open it up in Microsoft Excel.

6:12You'll also see at the top right-hand corner, I've got the ability to collaborate or duplicate this form. So if I want to get a link to this form and send it to people so that they can work on this with me, if they've got suggestions and whatnot, or if I want to use this as a template, maybe to just change one or two bits and pieces for a PowerPoint training session. And then once we're done, we get to choose how we want to collect responses. So basically, I choose who can respond. Is it anybody that has the link, or only people internally, or specific people? And then I can generate a link, I can shorten it if I want to, and copy that link or share it in whatever form I like, so that people can respond to it.

6:46And yes, I will see those responses coming in real-time on the Responses tab. And I have to say, I think this is a good app. Gathering feedback and analyzing responses with it works well.

0:00[LOGO SWOOSHING] Now it's time for something a little bit different, Microsoft Sway. And if you were thinking that this intro does look a bit different to the other videos, it's because, in fact, what you're looking at now was created in Sway. Normally, I use PowerPoint to create any opening slides for my videos. But Sway is a really interesting alternative, especially, I think, if you've got a touch device. So you can see that the graphic is just gently zooming in there, and because I do have a touch device, I'm just going to swipe sideways to show you the next slide if you think of this in kind of like in PowerPoint terms because Sway is a digital storytelling app.

0:41But I'm just literally swiping sideways. I can go back and forth. So, you know, Sway enables you to create content to delight your audience. But what Microsoft will say is it enables you to easily create beautiful visuals, and in particular, yes, presentations but also newsletters and any other documentation because I think these days, we very rarely create a newsletter to be printed out. So if you're creating some sort of internal newsletter, then why not create a Sway like this and send people the link that they can just look through on their device. Let me just swipe sideways again.

1:12You can see here I've got a stack of pictures. So, yes, we can use Sway for presentations, but I'm just going to tap that to show the next one. What about for sales pitches? I have to say, when I used to travel the country doing presentations on behalf of Microsoft. If I used Sway, it would always create an extra wow factor. And I'd always have a few people at the end saying, what was the program you used to create that presentation? It wasn't PowerPoint. Well, no, it was Sway. Yeah, great for people to look through on their own, not just for presentations. And it also works well on a mobile device as well a little automatically scale and sort itself out if people are using it on smaller screens.

1:45And you can also embed videos, and this just happened to be a random video of my dogs that I found on my computer. But you get the idea. I'm just literally swiping sideways back and forth to show this content, to play the media. So can you see it does kind of fulfill much of the same space that PowerPoint might feel, but it does look really quite different? But anyway, top right-hand corner, we're going to go in and edit this Sway. And what you'll see is I'm in the storyline view. So top left-hand corner, I've got the storyline, and this is where I'm adding these different chunks these different content types.

2:17So you can see there's the opening title card with that graphic there, and this is just a case of bringing in an image. So you can see that's the image that you saw on the opening slide. Top right-hand corner, that's where you can bring in images from your device or your Onedrive or whatever. And then you add these extra content types. So you click the little plus at any time you want to add something new, maybe another heading or a bit of text or maybe bring in a video, or do you remember that stack of pictures I had? That was that content type. And if I scroll down, there we go. Those are the four pictures that were kind of all stacked on top of each other, and I just sort of tapped them, and they sort of shuffled around quite nicely.

2:51That's a group called a stack, and you can expand it and collapse it. And again, there's that little video at the end there. So that's how you build up the content. But also top left-hand corner, you do have, as you might imagine, some different options for the look of the content. So actually, let me just go back to the beginning there and then click Design. And sometimes people say to me, well, yeah, that's great, but actually, I want this little text box thing to be down here or I want-- you've got limited control over how it looks. So top right-hand corner where you've got styles, you could, for example, decide what I want to swipe downwards rather than horizontally because when I previewed it to you just, then I was swiping sideways to move to the next part of my storyline.

3:29But you might choose to go vertically instead. So if I just choose that, and then top right-hand corner, choose play, you'll see this time I'm swiping up to see the different parts of my storyline there very much the same sort of idea. There's that stack again. Do you remember we saw that in the storyline? It was just a list of pictures, but because it was the stack style, I tap them to go through them. So different options. Also, on the design side of things, we can choose different looks and feels and different colors, but I'm going to warn you now. Your design team will hate it because it is quite restrictive because you might think, well, I want to change the position of this text box.

4:03Well, you can't. You can't grab it or move it around or make it smaller. You can only edit to the text that's in it. And so, for that reason, I would strongly recommend that you do start off with one of the pre-prepared templates to get you started. So let me just show my browser tabs again and go back to the office portal. And, of course, from the app launcher, take yourself to Sway. And the first time you do launch it, it might look a bit different to this. So don't be alarmed if it does look different, but what I want you to find is the templates. So if you take yourself into the templates and then you've got these sort of starting points to work from.

4:35So, for example, this business presentation one is quite nice. So when you choose a template, it'll give you the opportunity to just preview it. So you can see how it's going to look. I'm just going to swipe to see what other elements it's got. And then, if I'm happy with the look and feel of it, I can then click this option down here to start editing the Sway. That's going to obviously give you a new file based on that template. And then in that storyline view that we saw a second ago, you can then over type it with your own content, put in your own pictures, over type these bullet points with your own, and, yes, your way.

5:06Once you're done, obviously, you just play it to show it to your audience, but also you can share it. So basically, this is all online. So you can send anybody a link, and I love this. Certainly, when I was traveling around doing presentations, everybody always said, oh, can we have a copy of your presentation? Of course, you can. I would just generate a link, and they could then see or use that Sway. So do you consider this as a really interesting alternative to PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, business proposals? Give it a go.

0:00[LOGO SWOOSHING] So many apps, so little time. I think you're starting to get a feel now in this apps overview skill that there is an awful lot of functionality available in your Microsoft 365 subscription. And so far, we have looked at Planner, To-Do, Lists, Forms, and Sway, all of which really truly deserve more time than we've spent on them, but you'll now have an idea as to whether you want to investigate them more.

0:30And I mentioned in the introduction that some of the more mainstream apps like Outlook for the web and Teams and whatnot. I will cover in their own separate skills. But there are just a few more apps yet that I would like to spend just a minute or two on each, and so that's the focus of this skill the briefest of peeks at Yammer, Delve, Whiteboard, Stream, and Bookings. We'll start with Yammer, which has been around for quite a long time now, and Microsoft describes it as kind of like an enterprise social network tool. I mean, you can see it here. It's kind of like Facebook for your organization with everybody in the organization as your connections.

1:05So it's primarily a one-to-many type of communication where you publish information rather than collaborate on it. It's where you might ask questions to the wider organization if you don't know who or which team might know the answer. It's about sharing knowledge and tapping into the knowledge of other parts of the organization. So the idea is you've got your home feed here, which contains all of the posts from the different communities that you are a member of, or you can dive into a particular community that you are a member of down here. And although you can send and receive private messages, really truly, Yammer is all about sharing knowledge and connecting with communities.

1:41But I do feel a bit sorry for Yammer. It does kind of feel like it's been overshadowed by Microsoft Teams, which we are going to look at in more detail another time. But Teams is all about collaboration amongst groups of people who actively work together every day, whereas Yammer is more about connecting the wider communities across the entire organization. And so, for that reason, I think we only really tend to see both Yammer and Teams in use in really large organizations. Often, small and medium companies find just Teams alone fulfills both their knowledge sharing and collaboration needs.

2:16So anyway, that's Yammer. Next on my list, I've got Delve, and you use Delve to manage your Microsoft 365 profile, which I'll show you in a second, but also to discover information that's most likely to be interesting to you across your Microsoft 365 environment. So looking at the Delve home page here, what you're seeing here is a mixture of content from across Microsoft 365. So you'll see your own documents and also documents that your colleagues are working on. And these are going to be any files that are stored in Onedrive or SharePoint or that have been shared with you as attachments and emails, and these are intelligently selected for you by Delve.

2:53So you're going to see things in there that you might not have thought of looking for. You can search for stuff. So over on the left-hand side here, you've got a search pane, but if you search for particular people, I do like this. So let me click on Joni, for example, because I've searched for her before, so she's showing you my people list. But I get to see, well, it's kind of like Joni's profile, but actually, what I see is going to be different to what other people see. So I can see Joni's recent documents and her email attachments, but notice I am only going to see the documents that I have got access to already. So somebody else looking at Joni in their Delve will see a different combination of documents, but it's all about discoverability.

3:30You know, I might not have known to have searched for this inventory list because I might not know it existed, but looking at it, I think, oh my goodness, that is very useful. And I can click this little bookmark symbol there to add it to Favorites. I can also see a bit of information about Joni and also how she relates in the organization. And to give you an idea of what other people might see if they look at me, over on the left-hand side, I can manage my profile. So this is where I can update the information about me. But don't forget the actual content that other people say is not going to be the same as what you see, and this always worries people.

4:01They think, oh, well, how do I know that the documents I create aren't going to be made available to people who shouldn't see them? So look at the bottom left-hand corner, you can see this link here, are my documents safe in Delve? And look at this. I think the key thing is Delve never changes any permissions. So if you've put a document in Onedrive or a SharePoint document library that's got certain permissions set up, then that will control who can see it when they look at your profile in Delve. Next up, I've got Whiteboard, and this is basically a digital interactive whiteboard.

4:34And nine times out of 10, you're going to be sharing this with other people and scribbling on this Whiteboard at the same time. So over on the right-hand side, they would create a sharing link to this Whiteboard, and then you would see who else was collaborating on this. And if you've got a touch device. So let me just grab my Surface Pro pen over on the left-hand side here. I can turn on the little inking toolbar, which means that I can start scribbling and drawing on this. Also, over on the left-hand side, click the little plus there. I can add content. So, for example, maybe I want to add some reactions. I say, I, you know, anybody who's collaborating on this Whiteboard with me might want to add a little reaction, maybe a little question mark there or a green checkmark there.

5:10But to really get a feel for what you can do with these Whiteboards, I would urge you to look at the templates. There are lots and lots of pre-prepared sort of shapes and tables and whatnot that'll help you use Whiteboard with the people that you're collaborating with. I mean, have a look through. There's loads to play with here. The one that I quite like is these retrospectives. So maybe at the end of a project, you want to have a look at what worked well and what didn't. Let me just plonk this sailboat retrospective on there, and let me just zoom in on that part of the screen. But you can see the idea is anybody can then start double-clicking on these little notes here to put in what they think was a success, what they thought was strengths of the project, what held them back.

5:48And it's great that template did a lot of the hard work for us. We can just get on with collaborating on the interesting stuff. Microsoft Stream is an enterprise video service where everybody can upload and view and share videos across the organization. And you'll see that videos are organized in channels, and I've got trending videos here. At the top, of course, I can search for content. I can look at my content or create content. This is where I might create a channel or upload a video. But if I just go to my videos, so these are the ones that have been uploaded by the character I am logged in as, and let me just click on one of those, and it's going to start playing, which might distract me slightly.

6:24So let me just press pause, so I don't get all of that chatting away in my headphones. But I love this because, look, the transcript has been automatically generated when you upload a video. I can also add interactivity through the use of a Microsoft Form. And if I scroll down, you can see, yeah, we can have a conversation about this video. We can add comments. We can share it. I can add it to a watch list. I can like it. And also, because this is my video, I get extra options like updating the video details or trimming it, for example. It's a really powerful way of managing corporate videos.

6:56And lastly, Bookings. So for this app, I'd like you to imagine that I've had a bit of a career change, and I'm now a hairdresser, and my customers really want to be able to book appointments online, and frankly, I have no idea where to start with setting something like that up. So, yes, that's where Bookings comes in. It's a customer booking system. And as you might imagine, this is primarily aimed at small businesses, but it is actually possible to add it to an enterprise account. But let me just show you how it works. So you can see I've already set it up for my hairdressing business, and I've got a few options down the left-hand side, but let's start with business information.

7:31So, as you might imagine, I put in my address and business name, and whatnot. But usefully, for this example, I set my business hours because my hair salon is closed on Tuesdays and Sundays. So I don't want customers trying to book a haircut on a Sunday afternoon because I won't be open. Also, on the left-hand side, this is where I input all of the services that I want customers to be able to book. So, for example, a cut and blow dry lasts for 45 minutes and costs whatever amount of money, and you can see I've got a few other services as well. But look at this, staff. Now, obviously, I'm listed there as a staff member because I am the main hairdresser, but we are really busy on Fridays and Saturdays in the salon, so I've got a part-time hairdresser, Patti, who only works on those days.

8:09So you can see that I've set her working hours just for Friday and Saturday. I can also keep track of all of my customers and store their contact details and add any extra notes and whatnot. I'll come back to the booking page. But if I just show you the calendar, you'll see that I do have a few appointments already in the calendar. The pink ones are for me, and the orange ones there are booked for Patti, the other hairdresser, and I could use this New booking button up here to add in a new appointment if somebody were to ring up over the phone, wanting to book something in. But, of course, what we're really interested in is customers booking things online.

8:43So that's where this booking page tab comes in. So quite a few options to explore if you are interested. But basically, I get to choose my color scheme. I've got a link that I can share with people. So let's have a look. So if I just click Open published page, and this is looking really good. You can see it's got the name of my business there. Those are the services that we set up. So let's choose, oh, a cut and blow dry. This is where I get to choose the time and date that I want to have that appointment. So let's choose Thursday the 10th. And this is where I choose a staff member.

9:13Now Patti only works Fridays and Saturdays, remember. So she's not available. So this fictitious customer is going to have to choose me. Let's choose 11 o'clock in the morning. I can add in, obviously, my name and my email address, and any extra notes. So I will just quickly do that. And then click Book. That will take a minute or two to chew on that. The customer will get a confirmation email message sent to that email address that they typed in. And if they think to themselves, oh my goodness, I change my mind, they can reschedule that or cancel it. But, of course, what we're hoping is going to happen if I go back to Bookings and go back to the Calendar, what I'm expecting to see, there we go, the cut and blow dry on Thursday the 10th.

9:52It's in pink, so it's an appointment for me, and the customer name is Nora Nugget. Perfect. And that concludes our Microsoft 365 apps overview. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you viewing.