Microsoft 365 Training Course: Beginner Guide to Essential Basics with M365

[Music] Simon Says subscribe and click on the Bell icon to receive [Music] notifications we've made the files the instructor uses in this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these Microsoft 365 previously known as Office 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity tools and services offered by Microsoft it combines the traditional Microsoft Office applications with cloud-based Services collaboration tools and security features to enhance productivity and efficiency in both personal and professional settings Microsoft 365 includes all of the popular applications that we love such as word excel PowerPoint Outlook OneNote and SharePoint which are widely used used for creating and storing documents spreadsheets presentations managing emails and taking notes these applications are accessible across various different devices including desktop computers laptops tablets and smartphones allowing users to work seamlessly and collaborate in real time now in addition to the core office applications Microsoft 365 provides cloud storage through one drive this enables users to store and access their files from anywhere with an internet connection it also offers various communication and collaboration tools like Microsoft teams Which facilitates online meetings chat-based collaboration file sharing and project management furthermore Microsoft 365 offers several Advanced features and services such as Enterprise grade email hosting with exchange online cloud-based productivity tools like SharePoint and Yama for team collaboration and advanced security features to protect data and ensure compliance with privacy regulations now Microsoft 365 is available through subscription plans which typically include regular software updates technical support and access to the latest and greatest features the subscription model allows individuals businesses and organizations to benefit from the continually evolving Suite of tools and services provided by mic Micosoft that are always up to date to sign up for a Microsoft 365 subscription simply visit microsoft.com and choose a plan that best suits your needs plans are divided into personal business and Enterprise and you can compare all of these plans side by side on the product page of the Microsoft website now if you're simply an individual who wants to use Microsoft 365 at home for personal projects the personal plan gives you access to everything you need but is limited to only one person and that person is you if there are many of you in your family that need access to Microsoft 365 the family subscription would work best this gives you and up to six people access to the Microsoft Office Suite and tools whereas if you are a student who simply needs to be able to access apps like word excel and PowerPoint to complete assignments but not really access to anything else the office home and student plan would work best there are also numerous business plans available for more heavyduty use these plans include access to all of the office applications but include business collaboration tools like one drive for business SharePoint online exchange and Microsoft teams so it's definitely worth comparing each plan to see which one suits your needs the best now the final group of plans are Enterprise plans most of the time if you're working working within an organization they will have one of these plans and your it team will simply assign a license to you so you can use it the important thing to remember here is no matter which plan you select Microsoft 365 is your online Hub of productivity making it simple and seamless to work and collaborate with others on files and projects my name is Deborah Ashby and I'm going to be your host for this course I'm a Microsoft MVP and course instructor who's been training Microsoft applications and services for over 27 years I specifically been training Microsoft 365 for over 10 years and in fact I was part of the initial Microsoft 365 Global rollout team back in 2013 and Microsoft 365 has gone through a lot of transitions since then and I'm really excited to show you everything that we can currently do so that's it for this introduction it's now time for us to dive into the content so grab yourself a drink and I will see you over in the first lesson once you have a Microsoft 365 subscription the first step of course is to log in and we log in using the email address and the password associated with our Microsoft 365 account so that might be your personal email address or if you're working at an organization that's going to be your company email address now all I've done here is I've fired up a browser I've chosen to use Bing but you can choose whichever browser you like and you can simply search for either Microsoft 365 or Office 365 in the search bar so I'm going to go for Microsoft 365 and hit enter and then we should find that one of the first links we can see here is Office 365 login so let's click on this and it's going to take us across to the Microsoft homepage now what you might find if this isn't your first time logging into to Microsoft 365 it will remember you and log you straight in so you don't have to go through the signin process every time you want to access your applications and you can see here that I have a little message here that says hello Deb welcome back and then it's inviting me to sign in using the email address that I used last time now if this is the first time that you're logging in you're not going to have this here but what you do have in the top right hand corner is a little signin link so let's use use this method to replicate what you're going to see now if say for example the account that I use to log in isn't listed here I can choose use another account and this is going to take me to the signin screen so this is basically the screen that you'll see if this is the first time that you're logging in to Microsoft 365 so all you need to do is pop your email address into the correct field notice that you also get the opportunity to create an account if you haven't done that by this stage and then you can simply click on next you'll then be required to enter in your password again mine has already prepopulated because I've logged in previously type that in and click on sign in and that will log you directly into your Microsoft 365 portal and that's kind of what we call this homepage and in the next lesson we're going to have a little look around here get you familiar with where your applications are and how you access different parts of Microsoft 365 but before we leave this lesson let's just check to make sure that we know how we can sign out of Microsoft 365 at the end of the day again if we jump up to the top right hand corner of the screen you can see here where we have our profile picture if we click on this we can switch to another account or we can simply click on sign out now that we've logged into the online portal let's just take a little bit of time explor exploring the interface to get ourselves familiar with the layout and where we can find our applications now the first thing that you'll probably notice is this big area in the middle here underneath where it says welcome to Microsoft 365 you can see here that I have these fairly large thumbnails underneath the heading recommended and what you're basically seeing here are files that I've recently edited or files that I've shared in other parts of Microsoft 365 for example you can see here the first file is an Excel spreadsheet it's called product list and this is a file that I shared within a teams chat I can quickly access that file from my Microsoft 365 homepage also notice that we have three dots whenever we see three dots within Microsoft 365 that normally means there's some kind of menu underneath and the menu will reveal some additional options and things that we can do in this case with this file for example I can choose to open open it I can share it I can add it to my to-do list I can remove it from the list entirely I can download it to my PC or I can convert it to a PDF so always look out for these three dots because there's always a whole bunch of useful stuff underneath there now notice all the way over on the right hand side we have some scroll arrows that's just going to allow me to scroll through other documents that I've edited or shared recently and then underneath this recommended section we B basically have a quick access section so this is very similar to your recent documents list in applications like Word and Excel that's something you might be a little bit more familiar with now we have some filters at the top here currently I'm showing all documents so these are all of the documents that I've opened recently and if we hover over the top one here that just says Deb test notice again in the middle I have these three dots when I click I get another contextual menu with some more options another thing you'll noce notice is that in this last column I get a little bit more information as to activity on this particular file so you can see here for example the product list file the second one down it's telling me that this was a file that I shared in a teams chat if we take a look at bios for authors it's telling me that I've recently edited this if I scroll down a bit further to the meeting notes Word document I can see that this was a document that my colleague Adele shared with me so this is a pretty useful column because it sort of gives you an idea as to recent activity on your files now if we just quickly run across some of these other filters as you can see here we have a recently opened filter I think that's pretty self-explanatory we have a shared area again this is going to show any files that either you've shared with other people or have been shared with you and then finally we have a favorites section and currently I've favored three documents and I always recommend that documents that you access frequently you add those to your favorites just to make them easy to find now to do that if we go back to all documents let's say that I want to favorite this document just here training document again we go to our three dots in the center and we have a favorite option just here now if I toggle my favorites on I can see there is training document now another cool thing we can do here which really allows us to start to C customize our copy of Microsoft 365 is we can add our own content filters if I click on the plus just here this is going to allow me to specify different pieces of criteria and effectively create my own filter so maybe I'm just interested in seeing Excel documents that might be a filter I want to use I could add another content filter maybe I only want to see documents that are owned by myself and if you want to remove any of these filters just hover over you have a cross there if we click on the cross we can confirm that yes we want to delete the filter so I would highly recommend that you personalize this area of your Microsoft 365 homepage also notice on the right hand side we have a couple of other things we can do we can change the way that we're displaying our documents so I have mine in a list but I could choose to display them in a grid format or I'm going to get more of a thumbnail view so this is quite useful if you want to be able to see a preview of the document now I actually find this a little bit too cumbersome I prefer to have them in a long list but again that is very much personal preference I can even upload documents from my C drive directly from here as well so if I have something for example this file just here tuble orders. xlsx I can select it click on open and it's effectively going to upload that into Microsoft 365 and save it into one drive so you can see it's opened it directly in Excel online I can close this tab down and you'll see now at the top of my quick access list I have tuble orders one and because this is an Excel file if I click on my Excel filter I should be able to see it at the top of the list as well so really nice and straightforward now aside from the stuff that we have in the middle here you're probably wondering where you can access your applications from well all of that action happens over on the left hand side notice we have a menu bar and some of these icons should look really familiar this is where we can see Outlook teams word excel PowerPoint now yours might not look exactly the same as mine but if you click on the app launcher at the top that's going to allow you to see the full list of applications and if we click on all apps we can see everything that we have available in a big long list in alphabetical order and what you see in here will very much depend on the Microsoft 365 subscription that you signed up for so if you want to open any application we can simply click on it from here so once again if we click on Excel One thing you need to remember is that when you access Excel this way through the Microsoft 365 portal you're actually working in the online version of excel so if I was to open a blank workbook this looks a little bit different to the desktop version that you might be used to working with and we're going to talk a lot more about this a bit later on in the course but just get used to this idea that we can work online in the portal and we can also work with our desktop applications and everything synchronizes between the two versions now the idea behind these online versions of our apps is so that we can access and work on our documents when we're on the go as long as we have an internet connection so this offers a lot more flexibility than having to be at your desk with your desktop version of excel in order to work on a file I could be sitting on a train but as long as I have a WI Wi-Fi connection I can access my documents on my laptop or on my tablet or even on my phone so the general rule that I tend to work to is if I'm out and about and I need to access documents on the go I will log into the portal if I'm sitting at my desk and I want to work on a Word document for example I'll use my desktop applications and I'm going to show you in the next lesson exactly how you can install those desktop applications final couple of things to mention here notice we have a search bar at the top and this is a universal search so this will search across files folders SharePoint sites people and applications so I could type in for example Adele and it's going to find my colleague Adele I could type in the word Alpha and you can see it's finding some one note notebooks that have Alpha in the title but it's also finding a couple of SharePoint sites as well as well I could type in let's go for bios and there it's found a Word document bios for authors so this search is universal and it's pretty powerful now if we cast our eyes all the way over to the right hand side you can see we've got a few things up here if we click on our profile picture this is where we can go to sign out this is also where we can go to view our Microsoft 365 Account Details and profile and if we have more than one account this is also where we can switch accounts we also have a cog icon up here this is how we can access our settings and we don't really have a great deal of settings in here we can do a few fun things we can change the theme that we're using so I'm going to scroll down and I think I'm going to use this reddish Pink theme we can also switch to dark mode if that's what we prefer and I know that a lot of people find it a bit easier on their eyes if they use a dark theme now I'm going to stick to a white theme for for the balance of this course but just know that that option is there if you need it we also have a link in here that allows us to change our password so be aware of that as well and the final thing to mention here is we have access to something called my day and this basically feeds through to your outlook Calendar you can see we have a little mini calendar view I can see that tomorrow I have a project meeting coming up and I can also switch across to to-do which is going to show me any tasks that I've added so this is just a nice way of being able to access this information without actually having to open up Outlook so that's pretty much everything that you need to know about the Microsoft 365 interface have a little explore have a little play around with it and I will see you in the next lesson as I've already mentioned when you're working within the Microsoft 365 portal any application that you use use is basically the online version for example if I open up the app launcher and let's just very quickly open up word you can see that word opens in its own browser window and if I click on blank document I'm now working in word online and if you're used to using the word desktop version this is going to look very different the online applications are basically slim down versions of the full desktop application so whilst we can do most things that we would expect to be able to do in a Word document from here there are some things that we can't do for example one thing we can't do in the online version of word that we can do in the desktop version is a mail merge so the way to think about these online versions is that these are perfect if you are on the go for example if I'm maybe traveling somewhere for the day and I'm on a train working on my laptop or maybe a tablet device or a phone as long as I have a Wi-Fi connection I can log into my portal fire up word and start working on my documents and that's generally how I tend to use these I very much use them when I'm on the go but when I'm sitting at my desk I prefer to use the full desktop version now of course these online versions aren't the only versions that we have access to so don't worry we can still use the full desktop versions but if you've signed up for Microsoft 365 going to need to install the Microsoft 365 full version applications now fortunately this is made very easy because we can do it from our portal so let's close down a few of these windows and just go back to our homepage notice over on the right hand side we have an install apps button and we can choose to install our Microsoft 365 apps that includes things like Outlook one drive word excel and PowerPoint and then if we have other applications as part of our subscription we can go to other install options we would also come here if we wanted to install the applications in a language that isn't English now previously if you've just had the desktop version of the applications you might have been used to using 2013 2016 2019 when you download the applications through Microsoft 365 the version of the applications that you're using is Microsoft 36 65 and the advantage of this is that Microsoft 365 applications are continuously updated so no more downloading and buying different versions of office every few years or so your subscription ensures that you always get the latest updates and access to the newest features so it's pretty cool in that way now if you're wondering what the setup process is here I can't walk through the whole process with you because I already have these applications installed but but it is very straightforward if you were to click on Microsoft 365 apps just here it's going to download a setup file and that setup file will download to the downloads folder on your PC and this is what that file looks like office setup.exe so once this has finished downloading you simply need to come to your downloads folder and double click on this XE file and that will pretty much kick off the install process and you just really need to sit there and wait for it to finish and I would generally allow between 20 minutes and an hour for everything to install and update depending on the speed of your internet connection once the installation is finished you can then access your desktop applications in the same way as you always would so if you go down to your start button again this very much depends on the version of Windows that you're using I'm using Windows 11 but if I go to all apps we should then be able to find our Microsoft Office applications in here for example there is Excel and if you want these pinned to the taskbar like I have them running across the bottom to make them super easy to access you can simply write click go to more and choose pin to taskbar mine's already pinned so that's why it says unpin so my recommendation is that you go through and you pin all of the applications that you use most frequently and for me that would be word excel PowerPoint and Outlook so now if we open up word you can see the version is Microsoft 365 if I click on blank document this should look a lot more familiar to you we have our ribbon structure and we're ready to go in the full version now if you're wondering how we can create a Word document in the desktop version on our PC and then access it through the portal well this is where we save into one drive which is Microsoft's cloud storage now I don't want to go too much off on a tangent right now we do have a whole section on one drive a bit later on but just be aware that if I was to save this document I would save it into the cloud and that means I can access it through the online version in the portal so that's how you can install your desktop applications I will see you in the next lesson for the next section you'll want to download the course exercise files click the link below in the video description to get these you can also scroll through the details to find timestamps for each section in this course if you're enjoying this training please leave us a comment it's time now to complete the first exercise of the course exercise 01 and this isn't really an exercise that requires an answer or a demonstration I just want you to make sure you have a few things set up first of all so I'd like you to ensure that you have a working Microsoft 365 account I'd like you to open Microsoft 365 and familiarize yourself with the interface make sure you know where to go to access your apps and also get familiar with the recent list and where your files are stored finally I'd like you to install the desktop applications if you haven't done that already remember we have a button on that homepage that will allow us to do this nice and quickly that is pretty much all there is to this exercise once you've done these things you are ready to dive in section three so I'm going to head over there now and I'll see you there being able to access and work with our email is one of the most fundamental parts of working within Microsoft 365 so I have a two-part lesson and you're going to find this really useful if you've been predominantly used to using the desktop version of Outlook because the online version is quite different so over the next two lessons we're going to explore some of those differences and just get you acquainted with where everything lives in the online version of Outlook so we're going to start from our portal again we're going to click on our applications launcher and notice the Outlook is the first one in our apps list let's fire it up so when we open up Outlook online it's going to take us straight to our inbox now remember this is the inbox for the account associated with your Microsoft 365 email address and immediately this looks very different from the desktop version of Outlook notice running across the top we have what we call the simplified ribbon and this ribbon takes up a lot less space than the one that we're normally used to working with in not only Outlook but at other Microsoft applications we have a home ribbon where we're going to find most of the tasks that we frequently use we have a view ribbon where we can manage our settings and then finally we have a help ribbon now the first thing to point out is if you cast your eyes all the way over to the left hand side where we have this menu bar of different icons the top one here is where we click if we want to read and manage our email notice the one below that is the calendar we're going to get onto that a little bit later and then below that we have our people area so this is where we go to manage things like contacts now the next icon here allows us to access a files Library so this is going to show us any files that we've shared back and forth with other people via email and then we have some applications that we can access so we can open up a to-do list we can access Viva engage or Yammer from here we can jump to the bookings application we have access to one drive and also if we click more apps at the bottom and that's going to allow us to jump to other apps that we use frequently now in this lesson we're simply going to focus on email now the structure of our inbox in Outlook online is fairly standard you can see we have our folder pane on the left hand side if for some reason you can't see this notice just above we have three lines when we hover over it says toggle left pane so if we click this it gives us a little bit more real estate on the screen but we lose that folder list so you can toggle between this depending on how much space you need personally I always like to be able to see my Outlook email folders and underneath that there are my folders now notice at the top here we have a favorites area and we can basically add any folder or folder that we create to our favorites area so in general folders that I access fairly frequently I will add those to favorites for example if I wanted to add let's just say junk mail to my favorites I can right click on the folder and just simply click add favorites and it moves up to this favorites area if I want to remove again right click remove from favorites notice with my inbox I have 27 next to it which means I have 27 unread emails and if you take a look through your inbox you'll notice that the ones that are unread have a colored bar next to them they also show in bold now we can filter our inbox so that we only see the unread mail notice just above here we have a little filter icon and I can choose to filter by numerous different things so I can filter for all unread mail I could also filter for all mails that are flagged currently I don't have any or I can filter for emails that have been sent directly to me those that have file attachments or emails that mention me I also have some sorting options in here as well so by default your emails are going to be sorted by date newest to oldest but obviously you can change this in here now when it comes to viewing mail if I click on this email from Alex which is about lunch he's asking me if I want tacos on Tuesday when we click on a mail it's going to show in the reading pane now I have my reading pane displayed on the right hand side if you prefer to have it displayed at the bottom you can change this by clicking on The View tab clicking the drop down underneath layout and there where we have reading pain we can choose to show it on the bottom instead again this is one of those items that is very much personal preference you could even hide it all together if you prefer just to see your email list now I like to have my reading pan and I like to show it on the right and staying within this view menu we can also do things like change the density So currently mine's set to roomy I could change it to Cozy and you can see we have a little bit less room there or I can change it to compact so again modify this to whatever suits you best another option in here that you might want to change is underneath messages notice that we have the choice as to if we want our messages to be grouped into conversations or if you want to show each message separately so what this basically means is if I'm having a conversation backwards and forwards with Alex it will show as one email in my inbox to save a little bit of space and when I click on that I can see the entire conversation now some people really like this feature other people like to have each message in their inbox separately so you can simply click that option if that's what you prefer now when it comes to actually replying and forwarding messages there's a few different ways that we can do this if we click on the message to open it in the reading pane notice we have some icons just here we can reply reply to all or we can forward the message again we have three dots remember three dots denotes more actions and we have so many different things that we can do with our emails in here we can delete the email Mark it as on red we can add a flag we can print download it view all the things you would expect when you're working with your email also notice if we're going to reply we have a little bit of AI in action just here because what Outlook online will do is it will read the message and it will suggest things that I might want to reply with so what I could do here is I could start my reply with sounds good to me let's click it it's going to open up the reply addressed to Alex and it automatically inputs that text and I simp simply just need to click Send to send that off so it allows me to work a little bit more efficiently and quicker now when it comes to composing a new email notice on the home ribbon we have a new email button just here now we do have a drop down because we can choose to create a new email from here or if we want to create a new event in our calendar we can do that from directly within our inbox we can create a new group a storyline Post in yamama we can create a Word document a spreadsheet or a presentation directly from within our email we don't have to open up those individual applications now in this case we're just going to choose to create a new email message let's click on mail and as you would expect that's going to open up in the reading Pane and we can then address it I'm going to send mine to Adele we have a cc field just here if we need to CC anybody and we could also add the BCC field if that is also a requirement I'm going to add a quick subject and a quick message for Adele and at this stage I have a few different options if I get partway through my message and then maybe I click off somewhere else that message is going to be saved to my draft folder so you can see here over in favorites I have drafts let's click on it and the top one there is the message that I just composed I could choose to click the drop down next to send and I could schedule the send so maybe I don't want to send this email until 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning I can click on schedule send and it's going to allow me to enter my parameters I can delete the draw by clicking on the trash can or I can simply click on send it's also worth noting that the keyboard shortcut for sending email is contrl enter so those are some of the features in Outlook online join me in the next lesson when we're going to take a look at some of the settings and how you can customize your inbox in the previous lesson we started to take a look at some of the basics of working with Outlook online and we're going to just finish off by taking a look at a few other features of Outlook online and also how we can customize our personal settings now I'm going to start out in this lesson just by talking about app mentions currently I've got an email from Adell selected and we can see that in the reading pane now notice something about the body of this email it says Hey at Deb ashv so what Adele has done here is she has at mentioned me to really highlight this and Target the message towards me and app mentions are fairly common these days across social media applications if you've ever used anything like Twitter you're probably very familiar with app mentions now the cool thing about these app mentions is that this will appear in your notifications area so if you take a look all the way up in the top right hand corner notice we have a little bell icon just here and this is where we can open up our notifications pain and check it out what we have down below it's it says Adele mentioned you so I can click on my notifications and it's going to jump me to the email that I've been mentioned in now if we want to add mention somebody in an email let's just quickly create a brand new email all we need to do is type in the app symbol and then it's going to pull up the names of the people within your organization so maybe I want to Target this email towards Grady I can simply select him from the list and notice as soon as I at mention somebody it also adds them into the two field now another cool thing about these ad mentions is that you can modify them and it doesn't affect their functionality for example hello Grady Archie is a little bit too formal if this is a colleague I know really well I might want it to just say at Grady so I can simply delete out the word Archie and that at mention is still going to work so just be aware of that now I don't actually want to compose this email so I'm going to click click on discard to get rid of the email now much like when we were on the Microsoft 365 homepage the portal page we can view our mini calendar and our to-do list from within our inbox again if you cast your eyes up to the icons on the right you can see that we have this little icon just here and this will open up the my day pane so this is the same pane as what you see in the portal if we click this we get a mini calendar view I can see any meetings that are coming up and I can also see via the to-do tab any tasks that I need to action so I find this really useful because a lot of the time if I'm replying to emails I might have people asking me about certain events occurring on certain dates and I don't like to have to keep switching backwards and forwards to my calendar in order to put that into context so it's quite nice to be able to open this little pane where you can see your calendar up here so just be aware that you have that option as well now of course as with anything in Microsoft 365 you can completely customize what you're looking at in your inbox and there are a couple of different areas we can go to the first thing we can customize is what we're seeing in our ribbons running across the top for example I'm currently clicked on the home ribbon if I want to customize these icons and what I'm seeing here if we go all the way over to the right hand side and click the three dots that's that more options button again notice we have customize right at the bottom and if we hover over it we get a little green tip that says customize the ribbon add remove and rearrange buttons now if we go into here at the top it's going to show us what we currently have on our ribbon so I have delete archive report sweep and if I use the scroller I can scroll across and see all of the commands that are currently on the home ribbon now if I decide that I don't actually use some of these I can simply delete them for example maybe I want to remove the sweep button I can just click the cross and that's going to get rid of it and what you'll see is under the button section sweep no longer has a tick in it because it's not included on my ribbon everything else that has a tick is currently on that home ribbon and as you can imagine if you want to put it back you can simply put a check in the box and it's going to add that back in if I want to move or change the order I can simply pick up the option drag it and drop it to where I want it to be now in this groups area these are the groups that these commands belong to so if you take a look just above where we have delete archive report the actual group that these belong to is the move and delete group and you can see here here is the move and delete group so I could edit this group and change the name I could delete it by clicking on the trash can icon and if I want to add another group I have an add group button just here I can customize it and change the name and I can add commands to that group now I'm not going to do that so let's just delete so you can customize everything that you have have on your ribbon and you have that option for every single ribbon so if I move across to view and click the three dots I'm going to have a customized button just there but this time it's related to The View ribbon now when it comes to our overall settings for our Mbox if we go to the view ribbon and click on view settings this is going to open up the settings pane where we can really go through and get very granular about how our email account is set up it's also worth noting that we can access this same area by clicking on the Cog icon at the top here and choose us view all Outlook settings that's going to take us to the same place now I'm not going to go through all of these but I do recommend that you go through each category and each section and really set up how you want your outlook to look and function we've got options in here to adjust how it looks if we want to use dark mode or light mode we can set up how we want to be notified and what we want to be notified about we can create ourselves categories and we're going to do that a little bit later on and if we click on the email section again we can do things in here like create rules specify how we want to manage our junk email and also do things like setup email signatures now we're going to be diving in and out of this throughout the balance of this section but just be aware that that's where you can access all of your settings most of us these days are receiving being so much mail that it's important that we have some strategies in place for managing all of that email and one of the best ways to manage and organize our email is to create folders folders mean we can keep our inbox fairly clean and under control and it also allows us to group Mals that are related to specific projects or topics in one place making it a lot easier for us to search and find what we're looking for now by default Outlook has a number of folders already inbuilt and you can see these folders just here so we have things like inbox drafts sent items deleted items junk mail so on and so forth so you don't need to create these because these will be automatic what we can create are what we call Custom folders so these are folders that might be related to specific projects or specific people or specific topics for example notice next to inbox I have a little arrow just here and that's because if we click cck on this I already have a folder that I've created underneath my inbox and this is what we call a sub folder new Joiner stuff is a subfolder of my inbox and in general I like to create these types of folders as subfolders of my inbox and then I can create subfolders of subfolders if required now the process of creating folders is extremely simple let's right click on the Inbox and notice the first option here in the menu is create new sub folder as soon as I do that it gives gives me a little field to type into so let's call this we'll just call this marketing for example hit enter and now I have a brand new folder notice that these folders will be organized in alphabetical order now some people find that quite annoying because there's normally a very specific order that you like your folders to be in now the way that I get around this because the default behavior is to order alphabetically is I like to add a number on the front so maybe I want new joiners stuff to be at the top what I would do here is right click and choose rename and I would add a number so you might want to add one or 01 and that's going to pop that up to the top and then I can rename marketing and we'll put O2 on the front just here that's just a little technique that I like to use to get those folders in the order that suits me if I want to create a subfolder of marketing I could right click again create new subfolder and we'll call this one newsletters and hit enter so now I have a subfolder so now this is a subfolder of marketing if I Collapse up the marketing folder I no longer see that sub folder but I can still see the other folders that are within the inbox so my recommendation to you is to go through and start adding folders and you can call these whatever you like and organize your email however is most appropriate to you now when you have folders like this you're going to want to move mail to those folders because generally what we're aiming for when we're working with our email is at the end of the day we want to end up with what we call inbox zero we want to have zero mails in our inbox meaning that we've either dealt with the email or we've filed that email away now that is pretty tough for most people and I'm not the greatest at this myself but what I try to do is I try to schedule just 30 minutes at the end of the week to really go through my inbox and either delete file or store in a folder so if I want to move some Mals for example let's just move this top one here and I'm going to move this to the marketing folder I just simply drag and drop and the default action is to move now what about if I want to copy as oppos to move well again there are a few different ways that we can do this we can rightclick on the email and notice we have a copy option just here so I'm going to put this in marketing and you can see that it's now showing as an unread email in the marketing folder but it's also still in my inbox so don't forget this rightclick menu we have lots of options in here we could utilize this for moving as well we don't necessarily have to drag and drop choose whichever option you prefer we can move multiple simply by selecting multiple emails we can click on the circle next to the email or alternatively we can hold down shift click to select a bulk of emails now a couple of other things that we can do with these folders that we've created we can right click again we're going to see a contextual menu and we can delete the folder we can empty the folder which means it's going to delete all of the emails that are within that folder we can rename it or we can add it to favorites so maybe for this marketing folder I want to add that to my favorites and there it is again right click and remove from favorites if you no longer want it there now of course we can do things like setup rules to automatically move Mals that have specific crit ceria to folders that we've created and of course we will be covering that a little bit later on but for the time being that's really all there is to folders and subfolders so I will see you in the next lesson being able to search for and find email is extremely important we all receive so much email these days that being able to find emails quickly is going to be imperative and in the last last lesson I showed you one way that you can organize your mail by creating custom folders and moving mail into those but what about if we just want to search through our inbox to find specific emails well this is where we can use the search facility in Outlook online and fortunately the search facility that we have available is really comprehensive now if you cast your eyes to the top of your inbox notice we have a big old bar here that says search if we click in this notice to the left we now can specify the scope of our search so the default is to search all folders in our inbox but if we click this dropdown just here we can choose specific folders to search in Now in general when I'm looking for something I tend to want to search through everything so I keep this on all folders also notice that it's bringing me up some suggestions so maybe I want to search for all emails from Adele I can simply select Adele here it's going to go away and there is my search result if I want to clear this I can simply click on the cross to remove Adele and then I could search for something else now in this search bar we can type in all different types of criteria we can select people's names like we just did we can type in keywords or specific phrases that we're looking for and if you prefer to use search in a slightly more structured way if you take a look over to the right hand side notice we have a filters option just here if we click to open the this up this is going to open up kind of like a form where we can go through and enter in our criteria so once again we can specify where we're searching I'm going to keep this on all folders and I could complete the from field the two field the CC the subject or I can add keywords I can even search for mail between two different dates or if the mail has attachments so maybe I want to search for all emails that have a certain keyword so I'm going to go for tacos let's click click on search and take a look at that it's showing me all of the emails where that keyword exists so we can use this filter to combine things together if I want to refine this a little bit more and I'm only interested in emails with the keyword tacos from let's say Alex I can choose him in the from field click on search again and it's going to refine my list down to just that email and notice what we have in the search bar it's added in Alex and also the keyword of tacos let's click filters again if we want to clear out all of our information we have a clear filters button just here which will get rid of that criteria so the search bar at the top is pretty powerful when you're searching for emails now another way that we can search for emails is by utilizing search folders and search folders are brilliant if you find yourself running the same search over and over so maybe I am always looking for emails from Alex Wilbur he's my manager I like to keep track of what he's sending me so instead of coming up to the search bar and filling out my criteria each and every time I can simply create a search folder which makes this whole process a lot more efficient so if we scroll down our folder list notice towards the bottom we have something called search folders so let's say for example there's a specific search that I run frequently instead of coming up to the search bar at the top and having to complete all my criteria I can create a search folder instead so if you take a look towards the bottom of the folder list notice we have search folder just here if we rightclick we can create a new search folder and we have reasonably limited options in the online version if you're working with Outlook desktop you can really go to town on this and set up some really specific criteria for your search folder now I'm going to start really basic let's just create a search folder which only shows me all email that's currently unread so I'm going to choose unread email let's click on Create and you can see now I have a folder called unread email when I click on this it's going to apply that filter and I'm just seeing all the mails that I haven't currently had time to look at let's right click again and create another new search folder this time I'm only interested in email that's been sent directly to me and doesn't have anybody else in the two field so I'm going to select this we can rename this so I'm going to say emails to me let's click on create I get another new search folder and I can click on this now just to show you how much more powerful these search folders are in the desktop version of Outlook I've switched across to desktop Outlook again take a look at the bottom we have search folders if I rightclick again I can create a new search folder but the criteria I can specify is a lot more varied for example maybe I'm interested in mail specifically from Alex I could choose mail from specific people and then when I click on choose and go to my global address list I can choose Alex from the list let's click on from click on okay and then when I click on okay notice I have my search folder just here and it's just going to show me emails that I've received from Alex once again we can right click we can rename the folder we're going to call this mails from Alex so the options that you get the criteria you can add when you're working in the desktop version is a lot more varied than what you get in out look online so just be aware of that two other options that we have available in Outlook online to help us manage our emails are focused inbox and sweep so let's take a look at how both of these work because they are so simple now we're going to start with focused inbox if you take a look at my email list right now you'll see that in the middle I'm just display playing my inbox in one big long email list so everything that hits my email account is coming into my inbox and then once it gets to my inbox one of two things is happening it's either staying in my inbox so I can read it and deal with it later or it's being moved to a specific folder or some other action by any rule that I have set up on my mailbox now we haven't spoken about rules as yet we are going to get into that a little bit later on so for the time being everything that's being sent to me is just coming into my email list in my inbox now currently I don't have focused inbox turned on but if I was to go to the view Tab and we're going to go into view settings notice that in the layout group the first option we have here is focused inbox so what exactly is this well this is a little piece of functionality where Outlook helps us sort our email so that we can focus on what's most important so basically when an email hits your inbox Outlook will read it and determine if this is something that requires your attention or is maybe something that can be left for later and this Behavior this action the Outlook employees gets better over time as it learns the types of emails that you generally read and the types of emails that you may be leave for a while or delete so when I turn on focused inbox most of the time I get all of the email from actual real people into my focused inbox and things like newsletters and other things will go into my other inbox now currently as I said I don't have mine turned on I'm using don't sort my messages but if I select the top option here sort messages into focused and other and then click save at the bottom notice the change that now happens instead of just inbox at the top here I now have two folders focused and other so focus is where I'm going to find all of my important emails so I can focus on those first of all and other is where I'm going to find all of the emails that Outlook has determined aren't as important now because I've just turned this on it's not showing anything in other it's going to need a few more emails to come in before this Behavior kicks in now some people really like this other people don't and the reason why some people don't like this is because they tend to forget that they have this other folder and it causes them to miss emails that maybe they do actually want to read so I'm going to leave this up to you it is there as a feature to help you focus on only the important things now I'm going to go back into view settings I'm just going to choose don't sort my messages now if we just jump across to the desktop version of Outlook and take a look at how this works in here notice again currently I don't have focused inbox set on my inbox so I'm just seeing my emails divided down into all emails and then we have an unread folder at the top as well if I did want to turn on focused inbox I would just need to go to view and here we have the show focused inbox button let's click to turn this on and again we get something very similar we get a focused folder and we get other folder so that's how you would do that in the desktop version now the other option that you might want to use is if we go back to the Home tab this option just here the sweep command and you can see here as we hover over it says make a rule around the selected email authors so this is a little rule that really depends on what you currently have clicked in your inbox so if I click on let's go for Alex again and then click on sweep you can see here it's going to sweep messages from Alex specifically and I can choose to move all messages from the inbox folder to whatever folder I specify so I could create a new folder down here maybe call it mails from Alex and every time I receive a mail from Alex this sweep rule is going to activate now this first option will only move messages currently in my inbox to whatever folder I've specified if I want to move all messages from the inbox from Alex and any future messages that he sends me I would need to select the second option and then we have two other options in here I can always keep the latest message from Alex and move all of the rest into whatever folder I've specified or I can choose to always move messages from Alex that are older than 10 days from my inbox folder so again this is just making you a little bit more efficient when it comes to managing emails so if you like this option I would recommend that you turn this on so those are a couple of additional options that you have when it comes to managing your emails applying flags and categorizing our email are another couple of method methods that we can use to manage our inbox a little bit better and both flags and categories allow us to group together Mals of a specific type and make it a lot easier for us to find what we're looking for so let's start out by applying Flags now Flags in themselves are pretty functional for example if we take a look at this email from Alex about Teo Tuesday maybe this is a really important email and I don't want it to get lost down in my email list so I might choose to flag this email and maybe I want to remind myself to follow this up with Alex a little bit later on now notice as I hover over the mail in my inbox I have a little flag icon just here so this is what we call a quick flag I can click it and it's just going to apply a general flag to this message so immediately now this stands out in my inbox and you can do this with pretty much any mail I could flag this one from Adele maybe another one down here from Alex so if I'm working away in my inbox and I'm looking for any email that I have flagged I can then use my filter and I can choose flagged and that's just going to pull all of those to the top making it super easy for me to find what I'm looking for so in general I use flags on emails that I want to be able to find quickly or emails that I need to follow up on now if I want to remove the flag again we just simply click on the flag and it changes to a tick now aside from flagging emails directly in the email list we can also go to the home ribbon and we have a little flag icon just here now if we apply flags from the home ribbon notice we have a little bit more functionality because what we can do here is we can choose what type of flag that we want so if I need to follow up this email with Alex tomorrow I could choose to set a tomorrow flag so if I assign this it gives it a flag and what that means is that I'm going to get a reminder tomorrow that I need to follow up this email and we have various different options in here we can clear the flag from here as well we can choose to follow up tomorrow this week next week no date or we can Mark as complete now what also happens when you flag emails and again I'm just going to flag this one from Alex is that it adds it to your to-do list so this gives you an idea as to how all of the Microsoft 365 applications work together if I go over to my icons running down the left hand side notice that one of them is to-do and to-do is a little application in its own right it allows us to manage and track tasks and to-do items so if we quickly open up to-do what we should find is that in the flagged email section just here we can see anything that we flagged in our inbox as a to-do item and you can see there is the message Taco Tuesday I can click on it and I can add a little bit more detail and we're going to take a deeper dive into to-do a little bit later on but just be aware that it links through to this application now the other thing that we can do that can be really useful is we can apply categories to our emails and these categories are color coded now there are a couple of different ways that we can get to categories we can right click and go to categorize or alternatively on the home ribbon this little tag icon or label icon this is your categories area now if we click the drop-down what we're going to see in here is a bunch of different categories that are just named with generic blue green orange purple red yellow category names now of course these are simply here for you to rename so what we can do is we can go into manage categories here are all of the default categories and we can go through and we can change the names so if we click on the pencil icon I might want to have a category that's related to project Alpha and I can assign a color to this I'm going to leave these on the default colors I'm going to edit this one we'll call this marketing and I'm just going to go through and name some of these other categories so I've just named the first five categories here I'm not going to have a red or a yellow category so any categories you're not using you can simply click on the trash can to delete those out so now what I can do here is I can assign emails two specific categories I can right click go to categorize and now I can see my new customized categories so let's assign this to the fun stuff category you can see it gives it a little tag just here I'm going to assign this one to let's go for manager emails let's assign this one to project Alpha so on and so forth I think you get the idea so once we've assigned categories to emails if we just want to search for all emails that are part of the fun stuff category notice when we hover over the tag here it says search for all messages with the category fun stuff so I can simply click it's going to go away and it's going to show me those results notice at the top here in the search field it also has applied fun stuff so if I click the cross just here just type the category that I'm looking for up here so if I go for project Alpha you can see it shows me everything that contains the word project Alpha but it also shows me the category I created so I can choose project Alpha and it's going to run that search so flags and categories are a really helpful way to help you keep on top of emails that you need to follow up on and also categorize emails of the same type when working with Outlook mail it's important to understand the difference between archiving and deleting so let's take a look at these two different kinds of Behavior now when we delete mail and I'm just going to scroll down to let's go for this mail just here I'm going to select it and click on the trash can to delete it that email is effectively going to be moved to my deleted items folder so if you take a look in the folder list one of the default folders is deleted items let's click on this and this is where all of our deleted messages go initially now eventually these will get deleted out of the deleted folder and the time period that your mail is retained in this particular folder is very much dependent on the settings that your administrator has set I know at some organizations that I've worked at previously email is held in the deleted items folder for about 90 days before it's permanently deleted so if you're unsure as to what the policy is where you work then it's definitely worth worth sending an email to your it administrator now the good thing about emails being held here is that if you do accidentally delete something it is pretty simple to get it back so for example if I deleted this top mail accidentally I can select it in my deleted items folder I can rightclick and I can choose to restore this and Mals that you restore will be restored back to the folder that you deleted them from now another tip when working with delete deleted items is you can if you want to just choose to get rid of all your deleted items maybe you're definitely sure that you don't need to keep these and you don't even want to retain them for a specific time period what you can do is Select next to deleted items this icon just here which is going to select all emails in the deleted items folder and you can then simply press the delete key on your keyboard to get rid of all of those permanently and it is worth noting that once you do delete them from your deleted items folder they are gone for good now I'm not going to do that so let's just deselect all of my messages so that's how deleting Works in Outlook online so what is archiving well let's click back on our inbox and let's go to this mail just here now maybe this mail is something that I need to keep now that might be because it's informational and it's useful or it might be that that I need to keep this mail for something like compliance purposes this isn't a mail that I need to access or read every single day but I definitely need to keep it now there are a couple of different ways that we could deal with this we could just move it off into a folder or alternatively we could archive it now one of the advantages with archiving is that when you archive emails it helps save space within your mailbox when you're working with Outlook every person's mailbox has a specific size limit and if you start to get near your limit you might find that you have problems sending and receiving mail so in general we want to try and keep our mailbox as small as possible so that it functions accurately now when we move mail to folders that mail is still contributing towards the amount of space that we're using whereas if we archive an email it saves it off to a different part of the system so it doesn't count towards your inbox total so archiving effectively allows you to retain important emails but it also allows you to keep the amount of space that you're using in your inbox low now archiving is extremely simple we can archive one or more emails we just need to make our selection I'm going to hold down shift to select these three emails on the Home tab we have an archive button it's this one just here or alternatively if we rightclick we also have an archive option just here so if I click archive it's going to Archive those email emails and notice in the folder list I have an archive folder so I can click here and I can still see those emails that I've archived so that is the difference between deleting email And archiving email email signatures are a great way of signing off our emails and providing the recipient with some useful information such as our job title email address and contact details we can create our own customized email signatures to new mails and or replies now I already have an email signature set up so let's take a look at it if I create a brand new email you can see that when this opens I have my contact details automatically input into this email so immediately the recipient can see who this mail is coming from they can see my job title my company and also my telephone number now I'm going to just discard this for a second because I have a slightly different behavior for when I'm replying to emails so let's imagine that I want to reply to Alex I'm just going to click on the reply button notice that my email signature doesn't come up just here and that's because I've set it to only apply to new mails and not to replies now the reason why I don't have it included in replies is that sometimes it can get a little bit annoying particularly if you have quite a big and bulky email signature it's a little bit more helpful just to have it in the initial email but again this is personal preference you could set it for replies as well if you want to so let's take a look at where we can find all of our email signature information and how we can create our own signature now for this we're going to need to jump into our settings so we're going to go straight up to the Cog icon in the top right hand corner and we're going to go to view all Outlook settings now notice that I'm currently in my email settings in the layout group now we're going to find email signatures underneath compose and reply and here it is you can see the current signature that I have set up it's called Deb signature and there it is just there now we can have more than one signature we can have multiple and choose which one we want to use so let's create a new signature I'm just going to call this Deb Signature 2 and then this is a simple case of of designing your signature however you want now notice at the bottom we do have a formatting Toolbar to help us out with this you can even add things like images into your signature so maybe you want to have your actual picture in your signature as well as your contact information you can definitely do that now in this example we're not going to add an image I'm just going to put my name and this one is just going to have my email address of course I can apply formatting to this I can make this bold maybe I want to change the font color to Red I can really go to town so I'll leave this with you to have a little play around with let's scroll down and see what options we have now notice if I click the drop down it doesn't allow me to select Deb Signature 2 and that's because I need to click on Save first of all so it recognizes my new signature now I should be able to select Signature 2 which I can and then I can choose if I want to have this signature applied for replies and forwards now what a lot of people do here is they have two separate signatures one that has more information in it like this one and one that has just a little bit less so you could have for example Deb's signature for new messages and for replies and forwards Deb's signature to it's entirely up to you how you want to manage that so that is pretty much all we need to do let's click on Save and close down this window so now if I click on new email I should find that I have my full signature but if I click on reply so let's reply to Adele it's now showing Deb signature to if we're going to be out of the office for any period of time it's always a good idea to set up automatic replies more commonly known as out of office in general we'd set an out of office if we are maybe going on a holiday for a week or so but you can also set an out of office if you simply need some time to focus on something important if you're in a meeting or if you're simply just away from your desk and setting up automatic replies is actually really helpful to your recipients because it enables them to understand why you might not be replying immediately if you're in the office at all when you're going to be back and also alternative contact details so let's take a look at how we can utilize automatic replies now again this is something that you're going to find in your outlook online settings so we need to jump up to the Cog icon once again and straight into view all Outlook settings now we're in the email group and this time we want to go down to this category here automatic replies now currently mine is turned off because I am sitting here at my desk ready for any emails that come in but I am actually going away for long weekend to doublin this week so what I'm going to do is turn on automatic replies I'm going to say send replies only during a time period and then I can select when I want these automatic replies to be sent so I'm going away on Sunday so let's add that in and I'm going to change this to 9:00 and the end time I'm coming back on Tuesday and again I'm going to set this to 9:00 so between 9:00 on Sunday and 9:00 on Tuesday anybody who sends me an email is going to receive a notification that I'm not in the office and just below here is where we can set a few additional options and also type out what our outof office message is going to be so I could choose to block my calendar for this period And I could enter a title in here of Dublin for example now I'm not going to do that I could set it to also all automatically decline new invitations for events that occur during this period so let's say for example Adele schedules a meeting invites me but that meeting is on Monday and I'm not going to be here on Monday so instead of receiving that email and having to decline it despite the fact that I'm away I could choose to automatically decline that invite and the third option here is I can Decline and cancel my meetings during this period so again this is just a quick way of removing from the calendar anything that I have scheduled during the time that I'm going to be away so specify which options you want to use now when it comes down to the actual reply that we want to send notice here we have two options the first one is replies that are going to be sent to people who send us email from inside our organization and the second one is for replies to people outside of our organization so I might want to have a different message for people who work at my company from the message that gets sent to personal contacts so may be friends and family my friends and family don't really need to know that during this period they need to contact my manager Alex Wilbur for any issues that they might have we can set two separate messages alternatively we can just deselect this box and just have one General message that goes to everybody so let's add in our first message so here I have two different messages for two very different groups of people the first one is my business business message thank you for your email I'm currently out of the office with limited access to my email I'll be returning on the 20th of June if your issue is urgent please contact Alex Wilbur on extension 4456 and of course just above I have my formatting bar if I want to liven this up a little bit and then underneath my second message is for my friends and family it simply says on holiday friends if it's urgent call my Mobile now again you can see here send replies outside of your organization now it might be that somebody who works at a supplier or a vendor or a client who is technically outside of my organization they could possibly send me an email I don't really want this message going to them so I could say send replies only to contacts which is going to limit it to my personal contacts all we need to do is click on Save and these automatic replies will be sent during the time period that we've specified when working with colleagues and teammates it's sometimes really useful to be able to share specific folders or have folders shared with you for example if we take a look at my folder list you can see here I have a folder called marketing and beneath there I have a folder called newsletters now maybe I want to share this folder newsletters with my colleague Adele so that she can access it and see everything inside I could even give her permissions to create sub folders and also reply to messages as well so how do I give somebody else access to a specific folder in my inbox well the way that you need to look at this is you need to assign permissions for all of the top level folders so I need to give Adele permission to my inbox permission to the marketing folder and then permission to the newsletters subfolder so if we right click on the inbox notice we have sharing and and permissions so this is going to open up the permissions structure for the inbox folder and what I can do is click on the plus and I can add Adele in here there she is let's click on ADD and I can choose her level of access So currently it says permission level none she can pretty much do nothing with that folder but if I click the drop down I have different options that I can choose and all of these are different so if I go for owner you can pretty much do everything if you have owner access so with this level of access Adele is going to be able to see the full details of this folder she's going to be able to create items create subfolders edit everything and she also has delete access for everything as well so it's worth checking these going through and seeing what level of access you want to give each specific person now I'm going to go with publishing editor which means she can read the full details but she can also do things like create items and create subfolders so let's click on okay so I've given her permission to my inbox I now need to give her permission to the marketing folder so again we do the same thing rightclick sharing and permissions let's add Adele and change her access to publishing editor and we need to do the same for the subfolder newsletters because this is what I want her to have access to so sharing and permissions you guessed it we're going to select Adele and we're going to change her access to publishing editor so now that I've given her access to all of these folders Adele can go in and open my shared folder now to demonstrate this I'm going to show you how I would open a folder that Adele has shared with me so what I'm going to do here is where we have folders at the top let's rightclick and I'm going to say add shared folder or mailbox now in order for me to be able to open the mailbox and folder that Adele has shared with me Adele needs to have gone through that same process that I just did and added me into to the permissions for all of the folders as long as she's done that we can open the folder so I want to open a folder that Adele has shared with me let's select her and click on ADD and what you'll now see is if we scroll down to the bottom notice I now have a new folder called Adele Vance and when I open it up you can see there is the folder she gave me access to project Delta now the level of access that Adele gave me to her folder is slightly less than what I've given her to m so she's given me editor access as opposed to publishing editor and the difference here is that with editor access I am unable to create new subfolders so let's see if that is in fact true if I rightclick on the inbox check it out create new subfolder is grade out so the level of permissions that you give someone really matters when it comes to the extent of what they can do with that specific shared folder but that is how you can not only share your folders with somebody else but also open inboxes that have been shared with you Outlook rules help us manage our email we can apply rules to our inbox with different conditions and those conditions will execute certain tasks for example we could set up a rule so that when an email comes in from Adele it automatically gets moved to a specific folder in my inbox or I could set up a rule that says when an email comes in from Alex assign it to the manager emails category and also flag it so rules can help us become more efficient and help us manage and organize our email so let's take a look at a couple of examples and then I'll leave you to have a little play around with this now to set up new rules we need to jump into our Outlook settings so we could click on the Cog but just to be a little bit different in this lesson let's access it through the view ribbon if we go into view settings this is going to take us into our settings and notice under the email category we have a rules section now at the top here it basically defines what a rule is it says you can create rules that tell Outlook how to handle incoming email messages you choose both the conditions that trigger a rule and the actions the rule will take rules will run in the order shown in the list below starting with the rule at the top so you can have as many different rules as you like in here so let's click add a new rule and what we're going to do is we're going to do a fairly simple rule first of all and that is that whenever I receive an email from Adele it's going to get moved to a specific folder now before I do this I'm actually going to create a new folder for all my emails from Adele so underneath my inbox I'm going to right click create sub folder I'm going to call this 03 Mals from Adele now let's go back into our rules and add rule I'm just going to call it Adele Vance and now we can select a condition so my condition is that when the email is from and then I can choose Adele so when I receive an email from Adele what is the action that I'd like Outlook to take so I would like Outlook to move the message to the Adele folder now notice Adele isn't one of the folders that I'm getting here so I can choose move to a different folder it's going to expand that out and there is the folder that I'm looking for now I could add another action we are going to do that in the next example so let's just keep this fairly basic first of all and what I can also choose is to run the raw now so that will run the rule on the Mals currently in my inbox and move all Mals from Adele into to the correct folder and of course this rule will also apply going forward with new males that arrive from Adele and let's click on save so that rule is now toggled on and you can see here it is currently running on my inbox so we're just going to wait a couple of seconds for this rule to do its thing and while we're waiting for that it's it's also worth noting here that if we need to edit this rule we have a little pencil icon just here or we can delete the ru now it's finished running the ru so let's close down this window and check it out so if I go to the folder Mals from Adele I can see there is a mail from Adele now you might be a little bit confused by this cuz if we go back to the inbox notice that I still have two emails from Adele sitting in there they haven't been moved now you might think first of all that the rule isn't working but if we actually click on one of these mails and check out the email address notice that this is coming from no reply SharePoint online online.com so this is basically a document that she shared with me now because our rule is looking for Adele's email address in order to applied the rule that's why these two haven't been moved anything where Adele's actual email address is used have been moved and for us that is simply one email so that rule appears to be working let's set up another rule that is slightly more complex so we're going to go back into rules notice here we can toggle the rule off at any time so we don't necessarily have to delete it we can keep it but we can also disable the rule let's add another Rule and this rule I'm just going to call Alex so this time my condition is whenever I receive an email from Alex Wilbur I want Outlook to categorize it and I'm going to select a category of manager emails I'm going to add another action because I also want it to mark it with the importance of high and I could even add another action in here so I'm going to say pin to top let's choose run the RW now and click on save so once again you can see that that has just run on my mailbox let's close this down and check out what happens notice right at the top because it is pinned I have an email from Alex Wilbur Taco Tuesday notice that it's pinned to the top which is what we specified it's been assigned to the manager emails category and it's been marked with high importance so that is pretty much how rules work add some of your own test them out because they can be a great way of taking all the hard work out of managing email ensuring that our email accounts are set up in a way that really works for us is an extremely important part of working in Outlook so in this lesson we're going to take a look at some of the more advanced email settings and then I'll leave it up to you to decide which ones you want to change so we're going to go straight up to the Cog icon in the top right hand corner to open up our settings now when you click on the Cog we get a pane where we can customize and modify a few helpful settings so you can see here we can toggle our focused inbox off or on we can also toggle on if we require desktop notifications so if you like to have a popup like a little card in the corner of your screen every time you receive a new email you can toggle this option on we also get the opportunity to change the density of how we're viewing our emails so I have mine set to roomie but I could switch this to Cozy or even compact now I think I'm going to switch mine to Cozy we then get another opportunity to choose if we want to group our emails into conversations we did look at this earlier and we can also customize how we're displaying our reading paint so most of those options we've seen in earlier lessons of this course so let's jump straight into our Advanced Outlook settings and once again we have been in here before but we took a very Whistle Stop tour of some of the options so let's Deep dive in a little bit more detail and in this particular lesson we're just looking at our email settings now on the out tab we get another opportunity to turn on our focused inbox but we can also do things like customize the text size and spacing so this will actually increase or decrease the font size of the messages that you receive in your inbox we can also determine the message height so how many rows should each message use and that really relates to how many lines of the message you can actually see when you're simply looking at your email list in your inbox we can choose if we want to group by conversation and we can also determine if we want to see the sender image if they have one set and again we can choose if we want our reading pane to display on the right at the bottom or if we want it hidden altogether now if we jump across to compose and reply as we know this is where we can add and edit our email signatures and we can also choose things like our default message format so I would highly recommend that you composee all of your messages in HTML format we do have text in there as well but HTML pretty much guarantees that if you have any images or attachments that those will display correctly if you want the BCC line to appear by default then make sure you toggle this checkbox on and if you like to know which account you're sending from this is useful if you have multiple accounts then you can always show the from field as well we can set a default response type so maybe we want the default response to be reply all as opposed to reply we can set that just here and a really useful little option is the undo send so this allows us to cancel an email message after we've clicked on the send button how many times have you clicked on send and then realize that maybe you haven't sent an attachment or maybe you've made an error or you've sent it to the wrong person this kind of gives us a bit of a breather we can drag this slider up to let's say 10 seconds and that is the maximum and that gives us a 10-c window to click the undo button at the bottom of the screen and recall the message that we've just sent and at the bottom here we have suggested replies so as we saw when we're creating an email message or when we're responding to somebody Outlook has a bit of AI working in the background which shows us some suggested replies if you like that keep that toggled on if you don't this is where you come to deselect that box the next section is attachment and this option is really useful to have toggled on because this is going to warn you if you send a message that might be missing an attachment so if you refer to an attachment in the body of your email but Outlook recognizes that there isn't anything attached it's going to pop up and remind you and another cool thing we can do here is we can add additional storage accounts so currently I have my primary account which is my one drive cloud storage but if I store files in other applications such as Dropbox I could choose to add my Dropbox account to here as well to make it really easy to access my files that I have stored in Dropbox the rules tab we've already been in here this is where we come to create our rules we've already spoken about sweep so let's move across to junk email now this is where you can come to manage things like your blocked senders and domains so if you find that you're always getting junk email from a specific email address this is where you can come to add that email to your block senders list if you find find that valid emails from specific email addresses are being moved to your junk mail you could add those to your safe senders list to ensure that they come to your inbox and then underneath here we have some additional filters the next thing that we can customize are quick steps now quick steps are essentially very similar to rules except they're not applied to the inbox as a whole they're applied individually to emails so if I was to create a new Quick Step and I'm just going to call this mails from let's say Grady I can then choose an action much like I would a all so maybe I want to delete all males that come from Grady of course I'm not going to do that but maybe I want to flag any messages that come from Grady and I'm going to choose the today flag and I could even choose a shortcut for this quick step so what this means is if we just very quickly click on Save if I have an email from from Grady like I do here I can select it and then on the home ribbon underneath quick steps you can see there is my Quick Step mails from Grady if I click this it's going to execute that action which is to flag the email so quick steps are applied to individual emails rules are applied to the entire mailbox we can also customize what we call our quick actions if you've noticed when you hover over an email in your email list you get a few little icons you can see here flat email and pin now notice underneath these are currently the ones that I have displaying when I hover over an email but I could modify these I could choose to now it's worth noting that you can only have four actions if I try and select something else it's not going to let me but I could replace flag with move to folder instead and we can also do a similar thing when we open up a message you can see in the preview below currently when I open a message the icons that I see are reply reply all and for forward but I could if I wanted to add delete it adds that little icon I could add block and I could add let's say print for example so really set this up so it suits how you like to work now the sync email section this is useful if you need to set up your email account elsewhere because it's going to show you all of your pop and IMAP settings so just be aware that that's there you're probably not going to have to use it too often if we jump into message handling this is where we can customize things like our message options so for example if I want to empty my deleted items folder every time I sign out of Microsoft 365 I could choose this option I can specify how I like to Mark items in my inbox as red this is also where we can request read receipts from people and we also have some translation options down here as well the next one is forwarding so if you need to forward emails onto a different account or onto somebody else you can simply enable forwarding and type in the email address to forward to automatic replies we've seen what this is this is our out of office and then things like retention policies and SM mime you're not really going to need to go into so I wouldn't worry too much about those the final one is groups and this is related to Microsoft 365 groups now we haven't spoken about those as yet we are going to do that a bit later on in the course so for the time being I'm just going to close down this window so those are the main settings that you can change the final thing which is a little bit more fun if we click on the settings icon again we can change our theme and mode so if we click on this it's going to take us into appearance and as I said we could change our theme to dark that's quite nice we could also enable modern themes so these are lay to add a background image for further customization so you can choose those if you like and then we have some classic themes that we can can apply below now for this course I'm going to keep this on light but another area that you might possibly want to take a look at in here is the notifications area so this is where we can customize how we're notified for new messages reminders and when somebody reacts to our messages so definitely go in here and check that out we can also enable desktop notifications which is going to show us a little popup card in the corner and the final thing to really point out in here is this categories section this is where we're going to find all of our categories so it's another place we can go to to edit our current categories and also create new categories as well so definitely have a little browse through some of those advanced settings and set up your outlook so that it works best for you so now we have a pretty good idea as to how email works it's it's time now to switch our focus and start to explore the calendar in Outlook online so let's head on over to the leftand menu and notice that the second icon down is calendar so we can simply click on this to switch across now in this first lesson we're just going to familiarize ourselves with the layout and the different views that we can use to look at items in our calendar again we have some ribbons running across the top we have a home ribbon we have a view ribbon and also a help ribbon and underneath these ribbons we have a little mini calendar view and we can use our up and down arrows to scroll to the different months now if you decide that you don't particularly like having this mini calendar just here you you can collapse It Up by clicking on the little drop down arrow just here to give yourself a little bit more room now personally I like to have this mini calendar displayed now underneath our mini calendar this is where we can go to toggle on other calendars that we have access access to or add additional calendars so by default notice that underneath my calendars we have calendar selected so it's showing the calendar that's associated with my Microsoft 365 account and you can see I have a few different appointments and meetings in my calendar now just below that notice that I also have access to group calendars so if I click on show all this is going to show all of the calendars that I could possibly load into the main window you can see I have a calendar for United Kingdom holiday so if I turn this on it's just going to show in the calendar so this can actually be pretty useful now what we'll also see down here are any groups that we're a part of so we haven't spoken a great deal about Microsoft 365 groups as yet so I'm not going to linger too long on these but these are additional group calendars that I could toggle on so if I click in Project Alpha you can see that the appointments that show in green those ones are associated with that particular group shared calendar and if you do have multiple calendars selected they're going to show by default in this overlay mode if you're used to using the desktop version of your outlook Calendar you might be more familiar with multiple calendars showing side by side the behavior is different in Outlook online it will overlay them and personally I much prefer having everything merged into one calendar now over on the right hand side we have a pane that's going to show us any meetings that are occurring on that particular day you can see that today I had a project meeting and then finally running across the top on the home ribbon this is where we can Define how we're viewing our calendar so notice that currently I'm viewing my calendar in month view but notice that we can switch to week view which is going to show Monday to Sunday I could choose work week which is basically the same except it excludes the week weekends or I could go for day View and view appointments for individual days also notice that day view has a little drop down just here so we can choose to view 2 days 3 days 4 days so on and so forth now we do have another view and that is board view but we are going to talk about that in a later lesson so I'm going to skip over that for the time being I'm going to keep mine on month view other things that we have on this home ribbon we have a filter option just here so this is going to ow us to filter items within our calendar so currently I'm showing all items but if I only wanted to see appointments for example I could filter like so and it's basically going to remove everything else from my calendar apart from appointments let's put that back to all now we have a share button up here as well which is going to enable us to share our calendar with other people and we can also print a copy of our calendar now if we quickly switch to day View and scroll all the way up to the top it's sometimes good particularly if this is a new Microsoft 365 account to make sure that you define what you consider to be a working day because a working day the hours aren't the same for everybody some people might start at 700 and finished at 3:30 other people might start at 8: or 9 or 10 or you could have a completely different calendar if you work night shifts now you can Define your working hours from within your calendar in Outlook online so if we jump up to the Cog icon this is going to take us into our settings we need to click on view all Outlook settings and notice it's taking us straight to the calendar category and we can go through and we can modify some of our settings so I'm going to change a few things in here it says show first day of the week as Monday now I personally like to have Monday as the first day of the week but you can change this I know a lot of people like to display Sunday as the first day I can choose to show week numbers I'm going to turn that on because that can be quite helpful and I can also choose the appearance of different events that I add into my calendar so I can go for a light appearance or a bold appearance so let's switch it to bold just to see what that looks like I would always recommend that you make sure that your calendar time zone is set correctly and if you work across multiple time zones or you work with people in a different office you can also add another time zone here so let's add in let's go for New York and I can give this a label I'm going to call it NYC and let's call this one l n for London and I'm going to click on save to save those changes now I'm not going to go through all of these I would definitely recommend you do have a little look through these settings and customize accordingly now one thing I am going to do is I am going to show the weather on my calendar I'm going to show it in Celsius and let's display the weather for London and click on ADD now notice you can add up to five different locations into your calendar now the final thing I'm going to highlight to you in here are work hours and location so let's make sure we save our changes because this is what I was talking about earlier this is where you can Define your working days and also your working hours so if you only work Wednesday Thursday Friday you could deselect both of these days and then Define your times and if you need to modify these just click the drop down and select the correct working times notice in the last column we also have the opportunity to specify if we're working from the office or if we're working remotely now I work remotely every day so let's change all of these to remote and click on Save now check out these changes I changed my meeting event colors to bold so this looks a lot more bold than it did before and you can also see that I have my different time zones showing at the side here if we switch back to month view notice that we can also see the weather for the next few days so that's a quick Whistle Stop tour of the Outlook online calendar interface in the next couple of lessons we're going to start to explore some of the functionality so now we're a little bit more familiar with the calendar interface let's start to take a look at how we can add in appointments and meetings and it's very important to differentiate between these two an appointment in general is something that is just for you so that might be a doctor's appointment maybe you've scheduled some quiet time or maybe you're attending a training course whereas meetings are appointments that have invitees and of course within Outlook we can schedule in-person meetings and also online meetings using teams so let's take a look at the difference between the two now if we want to add a new appointment let's deal with those first of all we can go up to the Home tab and you can see we have a new event button now it doesn't matter if you're scheduling an appointment or a meeting you're going to get taken to this same window the thing that differentiates the two is whether this field just here has invite names in it or not so when we're scheduling an appointment something that's just for us we're going to leave this field blank another really important thing to make sure of is that you're scheduling in the correct calendar if you recall I'm displaying two calendars merged together I have my calendar and also the shared calendar for project Alpha so I don't want to accidentally schedule my doctor's appointment in the project Alpha Team calendar so we need to make sure at the top here that we have the correct calendar selected I want to choose my calendar let's add a title I'm going to go for doctor's appointment now notice to the left we can choose to associate a little icon with the subject so let's choose this little medical case just there we then get to specify the date and time so let's say this is next Tuesday and my doctor's appointment is at 2:00 and we'll say that that is going to be for an hour and a half now if this was something that repeated I could choose to set this to recurring and choose how often the recurrence occurs now I'm not going to be going to the doctor's daily weekly or monthly at least I hope not but if you are scheduling something that needs to repeat make sure you set the correct recurrence all we really need to do then is add a description now because this is a doctor's appointment I don't really want to add in all of the details of it maybe I'll just type in the address now notice over on the right hand side I get a little preview of the time that's going going to be blocked out in my calendar and if we take a look at the event tab at the top I can choose to categorize this so what I'm going to do here is it doesn't really fit in any of these categories I'm going to create a new category on the Fly and we'll call this personal and we'll make that a pinky color and let's assign the personal category I can even mark this as a private appointment so what that means is that anybody who has access to my calendar is not going to be able to see the details of this appointment they're going to be able to see that my time is blocked out that I'm busy but they don't know that it's a doctor's appointment so I would recommend that you turn that on for anything that's particularly personal now that's pretty much all I need in here so I'm simply going to click on save to add that into my calendar if I need to edit this for whatever reason I can simply click on the appointment and click on the edit button and make Myck changes so that is how we can add an appointment let's now add a meeting into our calendar for the 21st of June so once again we're going to click the new event button and we'll say this is the weekly team meeting again we can choose an icon I'm actually pretty happy with the icon that's been selected and we want to make sure that we're saving in the correct calendar I'm going to put this in my calendar and let's define our date and start time so this time going to go for I think I said the 22nd and this meeting is going to be at 10:30 and it's going to run to 11:30 now currently notice that the button still says save at the top here because this is still an appointment in order to turn this into a meeting we need to add some invitees so I'm going to invite Adele I'm going to invite Alex I'm going to invite Diego and who else should we invite let's invite Miriam as well now notice a little bit of AI in action here as I started adding these people it was checking their calendars for their availability so underneath it's suggesting some perfect times for this particular meeting now it's suggesting 4 to 5:00 on Thursday Friday or Monday but if I take a look in my calendar view over here I can see that the time that I've scheduled 10:30 to 11:30 everyone is available and if you do want to check that we have a scheduling assistant at the top here where it's going to show us all of the attendees and if there was any conflicts we would see them in here and we can move our meeting around accordingly so a few Tools in here to help you when it comes to scheduling now I'm going to categorize this as well and I'm going to create another new category let's call this team meetings and these are going to be green so let's assign that category and notice that as soon as I started to add invitees the default behavior is to automatically make this a teams meeting as soon as I started to type in those names this little toggle slider toggled itself on so what this means is that when I send this off to these different people the body or the description of the invite is going to contain the teams meeting link and people can just click on that link to join that meeting when it starts notice that instead of a save button we now have a send button let's click on on send to send that off and there we go I can see this scheduled in my calendar if I click on it and click edit let's take a look at the body you can see here there is all the information for this team's meeting which makes it super easy for anybody to join also notice that because I am the organizer of this meeting if I go back into the meeting I have a little tracking area that I can use and this is going to help me determine if my attendees are going to be coming to this meeting or if they're not now obviously I've just sent this most of them haven't had chance to even see the email as yet so I have four people not responding so I have didn't respond for people but as soon as these people start to accept or decline I can see that here in the tracking information which is super useful now another thing that you'll notice is if you open up the calendar in Microsoft teams and I have mine open just here notice that those appointments that we've added both the doctor's appointment and the week team meeting both feed through to my team's calendar as well so everything is truly integrated so that is how we can add appointments and meetings into our Outlook online calendar depending on the type of job that we do we might find that we need to share a calendar with somebody else this is quite often the situation with a PA and a manager very often the PA will be organizing the manager's calendar appointments and meetings and needs to have access to that calendar now assigning access to other people is a fairly straightforward process if we take a look over in this leftand pane where we have all of our calendars listed out if I wanted to give Adele access to my personal calendar all I would need to do is click on the three dots to open up the more options contextual menu and notice we have sharing and permissions so if I click on this all I need to do is add in the person or people who I want to have access to my calendar so I'm going to choose Adele and I then get to specify what level of access she has to my calendar so we have a few different options in here I could set it so that Adele can only view when I'm busy so that means that Adele won't be able to see the actual subject the details of the calendar appointment she'll just know that I'm busy during certain times I might want to allow Adele to view the titles and the locations but not actually anything that exists in the body of the appointment or meeting I can allow her to view all details so she can see everything or I can give her edit access so edit access allows Adele to do everything above so she can view all of the details and she can also edit and make changes to meetings and appointments and the highest level of access is delegate access if you give someone delegate access to your calendar they can pretty much do everything as if they were the owner of that calendar now I'm going to give Adele can edit privileges I also get the opportunity to determine how everybody else can view my calendar so everybody else within my organization so I could say that my calendar is is n't shared at all or I can give them higher levels of access now I'm going to leave this on the default people can view my calendar but they can only see when I'm busy Only Adele and myself are the ones that can see the details let's click on share now what's going to happen there is that Adele is now going to receive an email letting her know that I've shared my calendar with her and she will need to go through the process of opening that calendar within her Outlook online now Adele has also shared her calendar with me so let me show you the process you go through when you want to open somebody else's calendar after they've given you permissions so if we switch back across to our email what I should find is that I get an email from Adele letting me know that she's given me access to her calendar now remember in a previous lesson I set up a rule that moves all emails from Adele to the Mals from Adele folder so if we click on this folder there it is at the top you can see here it says I'd like to share my calendar with you so we need to accept this and it will go away and it will add the calendar check out what we have we have a new category called people's calendars and there we have Adele advance and if I select it it's going to show her meetings merged with my meetings as well now if for some reason you don't actually receive that email you can still add the calendar so if I know that Adele has has given me access to a calendar I just haven't got that email I can go to add calendar add from directory I can choose my account that's the one I want to add it to then I can search for Adele and click on ADD and that will do exactly the same thing so pretty straightforward to share your calendar and also open other people's calendars the final point to cover here is if we go back into this add calendar section this is where we can come to add all different types of calendar for example we can add our own personal calendars so maybe you have other email accounts that contain calendars that you use you can go through and you can add them through this link we can create a brand new blank calendar from scratch if we want to we can add other people's calendars from the directory we can even do things like search for public holiday calendars so depending on what country you're in you can simply find your country select it and it will add all of that country's public holidays to your calendar and if you're a big lover of sports we can also add things like sports calendars as well so definitely have a little look through there and make sure that you have access to all of the calendars that are of interest to you in this lesson we're going to briefly discuss how we can export our Outlook data to a PST file now why might you want to do this well there are a couple of different reasons exporting data from Outlook to a PST is a great way of keeping your data safe it can be utilized as a backup for all of your emails calendar items and contact information alternatively you might find yourself in the position of having to export your data out to a PST if you're maybe moving companies and you want to take your Outlook data with you we can export everything that you see in your Outlook data file and the process of doing this is fairly straightforward now the first thing to note here is that you do need to do this from the desktop version of Outlook so I've quickly opened that up and we'll find our export options underneath the file tab at the top notice in the leftand menu we have an option for open and Export and we have a few different things that we can select in here now we're going to go for the Import and Export option in a moment but just take a moment to take a look at some of these other options that can be really useful we can open a calendar from here we can open a different Outlook data file or we can open other user folders so let's click on Import and Export now what this is going to do is it's going to open up a wizard style dialogue box and you can see we have quite a few options in here just the top two are related to exporting information the others you can see in here are all related to importing information into your Outlook account so let's say that we want to export all of the males in our inbox or maybe in a specific folder this is where we would choose the export to a file option and if you take a look underneath we get a little bit of a description so we know exactly what we're doing it says export Outlook information to a file for use in other programs so that pretty much sounds like what we wanton let's click on next to work our way through the wizard now we can export out to two different types of files so we can export our information out into a comma separated value file so this looks a lot like an Excel file we'll have all of the data separated by commas usually and then we can TIY that data up and have it stored in Excel now the alternative way of exporting is to export to an Outlook data file or a PST file as they're known in Outlook and this is by far the most common way of exporting data so let's choose this option we're going to click on next and this is where we can now go in and we can choose what information we want to export so you can see here if I just collapse this up if you have multiple email accounts attached to your outlook like I do and I've got the last two blurred out because they are my personal email accounts but I do have three accounts attached so the point I'm trying to illustrate here is that you can export data from any account that you currently have attached to your your outlook so let's expand this one just here and notice that aside from the email folders so we have inbox draft sent items so on and so forth we also have things like calendar and contacts so you can really export the whole lot out to a PST now what you could do here is if you wanted to export everything you could click on the top level up here the mailbox you could say include sub folders and click on next and that will export absolutely everything so all of your emails all of your contacts and all of your calendar items if you don't want to export everything and you want to be a bit more specific you can drill down into any of these folders for example let's expand the inbox you can see here are my subfolders and for the purpose of this demonstration because I don't want to export everything out to a huge file I'm just going to choose to export the marketing folder and this marketing folder does have a sub folder that folder is called newsletters so I'm going to say yes include subfolders so let's click on next we then get to choose where we want to store the exported file so by default mine is going to go into my one drive into my documents folder and it's going to be called backup. PST now of course if you want to rename this you can do that at this stage and if you want to save it somewhere else just click on the browse button we then get some options we can replace duplicates with items exported we can allow duplicate items to be created or do not export duplicate items so I'm just going to say replace duplicates with items exported let's click on finish and depending on how much information you have stored in your Outlook account this can take a while so you might need to be a little bit patient and the xat should now be done so let's jump into one drive and take a look at the documents folder and see if the backup file is there and yes yes there it is and you can see if we take a look at the type it says Outlook data file so now that I have that data stored off as a backup if I was to maybe open up a new Outlook account or maybe move to a different company I could safely take this file with me and then import that into my new copy of Outlook and the process of importing is pretty much the same we go up to file open and export and then we click the import export button but this time we want to import from another program or file and if you take a look just below it says import data from other files such as Outlook data files PST files so then when we click on next we want to import the PST and then we can find the file it's in exactly the same place and work through the wizard to import that data back in now I'm not going to go all the way through to the end of this wizer because I don't want it to overwrite what I already have but once you've done that you'll safely have all of your data back in your Outlook account and as I mentioned it is a great way of backing up your Outlook data a really great way of being able to quickly jot down notes without interrupting your workflow is to utilize notes within Microsoft 365 Now notes does look a little bit different depending on whether you're using the online version of Outlook or if you're using the desktop version so let's explore both of these so I'm in Outlook online I'm currently just clicked on my inbox but if you cast your eyes all the way to the top right hand corner of the screen notice that we have a few items or a few icons I should say running across the top in this horizontal menu bar you can see here that one of these if I hover my mouse over the screen tip says one note feed now if you're not aware of what one note note is one note is another Microsoft 365 application and what it basically is is a note taking application if you click on your app launcher you'll be able to see it sitting in here now this isn't a one note course one note is outside of the scope of this course we will sort of touch on it here and there but the OneNote application serves as a digital notebook we can create notebooks and within that we can create sections and pages and we can add notes and do lots of really cool things with those notes and of course it is integrated with other applications such as Outlook so if we click on one note feed this is where we can quickly take notes and have access to those notes when we're working in our email so notice here at the top we have add a note if I click on this it's going to open up a brand new sticky note and this kind of looks a little bit like sticking Post-it notes on your screen so in here we we have some space to type whatever our note is about so maybe there is some kind of access code for the front door of our office that I can never remember I can simply add a note and type it into here notice right at the bottom we have minimal options when it comes to formatting but we do have some options so I could select text much like I would if I was working in a Word document I could click on B to make it bold I could make it italic I could underline it I could strike through I can even add things like bulleted lists into here as well so if we click this I can then type whatever it is I need to type to make it look a little bit more structured I can even add images into my notes if I want to so if we click on insert image let's just select the first image that we find this is just an example there you go we can add that into our notes also notice just above we have three dots in the corner of our note so if we click these we can choose to change the color of the Post-it note the sticky note so let's change it to Yellow I could copy the note to the clipboard which is going to allow me to paste it elsewhere or I could completely delete the note so we have a few options let's click on the back button you can now see when we go back in our feed we can see that note sitting just there and we can carry on adding notes as required so jotting down things in this way by utilizing the one note feed is a great way of just not interrupting your workflow when you're working in your calendar or your inbox also notice right at the top we have a search notes area so if we're looking for something specific we can type in a keyword and it will search through the notes and find what you're looking for so that is one way to work with notes when you're working in Outlook online let's jump across to the desktop version of Outlook because we have a slightly different way of utilizing notes now when we're working in the desktop version of Outlook if you take a look all the way over on the left hand side where we have our different icons to switch us between our mail and our calendar so on and so forth notice at the bottom it says more apps now in here we have a folder called notes so if we click on this it's going to jump us across to the notes section of Outlook desktop now in here you're going to see all of the email accounts you have attached to your outlook so once again I have three different accounts the one I'm using is this middle one in here now notice what we have we have a little sticky note that says code for front door and if you recall that is exactly the note that I created when I was working in the online version if we double click to open up this sticky node you can see there it is it's pretty huge we can resize this down but that is pretty much the information that I typed in when we were working in Outlook online so we have code for front door at the top we have those Willet points and then I just typed in some junk information so everything again synchronizes and filters through now if you do prefer to work in the desktop version as opposed to the online version you can also create notes from here notice on the home ribbon we have a new note button we can open this up and we can start to type our notes again I can't think of anything particularly interesting to type into here so I'm just going to type some junk when we close the note down it's going to save and we can simply double click to reopen it so if we right click and go to categorize maybe I want to categorize this note as being related to project Alpha I can select the project Alpha category and that is also going to change the color of the note now just above where it says current view we can choose to display these as icons as we have them now or we can display them in different ways such as as a notes list so if we click notes list we just get a different way of viewing those notes once again this is entirely personal preference how you like to organize and display your notes so pretty straightforward that is all there is to it all you need to remember is that everything synchronizes so I'm actually going to give this a bit of a nicer name let's just call this um my note and click away and if we go back to Outlook online we should find that this note has now synchronized across so let's open up the one note feed again and there we have the synchronized note another important part of Outlook online is being able to manage our contacts successfully and contacts in the context of Outlook are referred to as people so if you cast your eyes over to the left hand side where we have our vertical menu notice that the third icon down just here is labeled people if we click on it that's going to jump us into our contacts now when we jump into our contacts you can see that we have numerous different folders the first one and the most prominent one the one that I have selected here is your contacts now currently I don't have any contacts in my list we can also do things like create contact lists which I'm going to delve into a bit more in the next lesson now aside from having a list of your contacts we also have access to various different directories for example if I click on default global address list this is going to show all of the people who are basically attached to my tenant who are within my company so here I can see some familiar faces I can see Adele I can see Alex I can see Diego Grady Henrietta all of those types of people so these are people that are within my company so they're part of the global company address list but I don't necessarily have them as my contacts now of course you can change that we can select any of these people for example Adele let's select her right click and I can say add to contacts so as soon as I add Adele it's going to pop open a little contact profile paint so this is where I can see Adele's information and if I want to add anything more to it for example maybe she has more than one email address I could add a secondary email in here or maybe I could add a secondary phone number something along those lines once I'm happy if I just click on Save at the bottom it's going to save that contact information but now if we jump to your contacts you can see there is Adele so just be aware that you can add anybody from your global address list into your personal contacts in order to make it easier to access them it's also worth noting that if you take a look at the home ribbon we have an add to contacts button up here as well and if that person is somebody that you communicate with frequently you might even want to add them into your favorites folder so once again with the Dell selected I'm going to click add to favorites on the home ribbon and that's just going to put a little star next to her name and I can now access that contact card from my Favorites folder so how you organize these folders is entirely up to you but just know that all of your company contacts are going to be under the default global address list now as we just saw for every contact that we have in this list we get to see quite a bit of information so let's use Adele as our example again we can see the position that she holds she's a retail manager I have option to call her using teams I can send her an email directly from her contact card I can start conversation or a chat with Adele again that's going to be in teams or I can click the three dots and I can choose to categorize her now I don't currently have any categories created but I could select new category and I could set up let's say a retail category let's just give it the color of red and click on Save now if you check out my folder list you can see that underneath the categories folder I have retail and if I click on retail there is Adele now it's worth noting that if you come back to your global address list and go to the next one down Alex notice I don't get the three dots there to assign him to a category and it's because I don't have him as one of my contacts so I'm going to add Alex into my contacts let's just click on Save and now that he's in my contacts I can then click on the Three Dots and I can choose to categorize him so let's create a new category for him this is going to be marketing contacts and we're going to give that an orange color so categories are an easy way of grouping your contacts together now just take a moment to look at some of the information that you have on each and every contact card because there is quite a bit of it notice at the top we have some tabs overview so we can see the local time preferred Meeting hours the email address office Loc location things like that we have the contact information so we can see email address again we can see phone numbers we can see some information about the organization that person works for we can see any files that they've shared we can see any emails that have been sent between myself and Alex and we can also have a LinkedIn tab here as well so if we want to add them through Linkedin this is a quick way of doing it we just need to make sure that we select the correct Pro far now if we go back to Adele and take a look at the email tab you can see that I do have some information in here because I have invited Adele to share my calendar so that's effectively an email and that email is logged underneath the email tab so lots of information that we can see about our contacts so that's a bit of a Whistle Stop tour as to how you can access your contacts how you can see your contacts in different distribution lists how you can categorize your contacts and add them to your own personal contacts in the next lesson I'm going to show you how you can create your own contact cards in the previous lesson we started exploring contacts or people in Outlook online so in this lesson we're going to take a look at how we can add new contacts into our address book and how we can utilize that contact information so notice that currently I'm clicked on the your contacts folder so to add a new contact it is a simple case of going up to where we have new contact notice there is a keyboard shortcut of shift plus n now if we click the drop- down arrow next to new contact we have a choice of different things that we can add we can add new contacts we can add a new contact list or we can add a new group so let's start out Simply by adding a brand new contact this is going to open up an empty contact card and we can simply add in the detail details so I've just added some test details for Harry Potter also note that at the bottom I've added a category called Wizardry and I've added his contact card to that category so once we're happy we can click on Save it's going to save that contact card and there it is in my contacts list so super simple to add in new contacts now one advantage of having people stored in your contacts is it makes them a lot easier to email for example if we're already working with our contacts and maybe I decide that I want to email Harry I can simply click on his contact card and I have an email link just here if I click on the email icon it's going to open up a brand new email address to Harry I can add a subject and then I can type my message and then click on send now another thing that happens when we add somebody into our contacts is if we're working with our email and we create a brand new email if I want to address this to Harry because he's in my contacts as soon as I start to type his name it's going to pull that contact card up and I can then just simply select it so I don't have to type in his full email address each time because he's recognized in my contacts list and of course if we need to edit or change any information on any contact card record we have an edit contact button at the bottom we can simply Click It Go in make add changes and then make sure we click save at the bottom so contacts are really easy to add and manage now if we go back to clicking the drop- down arrow notice we have something called new contact list so this is where we can effectively group together people in contact lists so maybe I want to group together everybody in the marketing team I could call this marketing list and then I can go in and add in the email addresses so let's say Grady let's say Alex and let's say that henriett uh also works in marketing I can give my group a description I don't have to I can simply click on create to create this contact list now as soon as I create a contact list it's going to add it into the contact lists folder this one just here your contact lists I can see marketing list and if I want to send an email to all three of these people I have a send email link just here it's going to open up a brand new email and then anything I type in here will be sent to everybody in the marketing list and if you want to see who is part of a particular contact group you can click on the plus it will expand out and you can see the individual email addresses I can even utilize the marketing list name in order to compose an email for example if we go back to our inbox and we click new email if I start to type in marketing list it's going to bring it up I can select it and that's an alternative way of sending to that group now the final thing that we have in this dropdown is to create a brand new group so this is exactly the same as creating a Microsoft 365 group that we saw earlier remember Microsoft 365 groups fee through to lots of different applications now we're not going to walk through this process we have done it a few times but just know that's what that option does and we can see our Microsoft 365 groups in our folder list by expanding groups just here and we can see any Microsoft 365 groups that we have set up by clicking on the all groups folder just here and there are all of our groups and of course we can send emails directly from here as well the final thing to mention here is if you want to export your contacts or import other contacts into Outlook notice on the home ribbon just here we have a manage contacts button where we have our Import and Export options so if I wanted to export my contacts I can click on this little button I can choose to export all of my contacts and then just simply click on export and what it does is it creates a CSV file you can see at the top here it says contacts. CSV when I click on open it's going to open in Excel and you can see here exactly what it does because I exported from my contacts list and I only have three people in there it's exported all of the information out into an Excel spreadsheet and this can be really really useful so just be aware of all the different options that you have when it comes to adding and managing people or contacts in Outlook it's time now for us to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section of the course and this section was all about Outlook so the first thing I'd like you to do is to create three folders in Outlook and name them project a project B and project C next I'd like you to flag at least four males for followup and I don't mind which flag you use I then like you to create a rule that moves all flagged email regardless of the flag to the project a folder next I'd like you to set up an email signature and set it for new messages only then I'd like you to create categories for project a project B and project C and assign them to some mails in your inbox once you've done that I'd like you to create a search folder that searches for all unread mails and then finally I'd like you to create a team meeting for next Wednesday in your calendar from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. and you can invite people if you want that part is optional or you can always invite yourself under a different account and I'd like you to ensure that this is a teams meeting so a few different things to do there if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing I asked you to do here was to create three folders for project a b and c now I've done that in my inbox you can see them sitting just here a b and c and it's a simple case of right clicking and choosing create new subfolder next I asked you to flag at least four emails in your inbox so you can see that I've done that to the top four emails just here again that's a simple case of selecting the email and you can right click and go to Flag mine says unflagged because it's already flagged alternatively you can go to the tags group just here and you can choose your flag from the dropdown then I asked you to create a rule that moves all flagged messages is to the project a folder now we want this rule to apply to our entire inbox so when we click the rules drop down we want to go to manage rules and then we can add a new rule just here and there is my rule let's edit it take a look at it I just called it project a the condition is when the message is flagged and we're choosing any flag here and the action is to move to the project a folder I'm going to say run raw now let's click on Save and when we go back to our inbox we should find that those males have been moved to the project a folder which they have next I ask you to set up an email signature and set it for new messages only so for this we need to go up to the Cog icon at the top go to the compose and reply section and this is where we can create a new signature so when we click on new signature we just need to give our signature a name I'm going to call mine Deb 3 and then we can just add the information that we want in our signature now I'm just keeping mind super basic here you could go to town with the formatting underneath now important to remember that once you create your signature you need to click save and then when we go down here we can choose which signature we want to apply for new messages so I would select Deb 3 and then for replies and forwards I'm going to say no signature and click on Save next I asked you to create categories for project a project B and project C and assign them to some mails so you can see that the top four emails here I've just assigned project a and Project B to those if you need to create categories you can rightclick again go to categorize and manage categories and this is where you can create your categories so I have mine in here project a project B and project C and when it comes to assigning these categories we can rightclick we can categorize and I'm going to choose project C for this mail just here the next thing I asked you to do was to create a search folder that searches for all unread mails so let's scroll down to where we have search folders I'm going to right click create new search folder and a new search folder is searching for unread email now it's telling me that that folder already exists so I'm just going to rename it to unread email 2 click on Create and now we should find that when we click on this it's just going to show us all of our unread mail the final thing I asked you to do was to flip across to your calendar and create a new team meeting for next Wednesday 2: to 3:00 p.m. and make sure that it's a team's meeting so let's click on next Wednesday we're going to create a new event we're going to make sure that we're saving into the correct calendar so I'm going to choose my calendar this is going to be a team meeting I'm going to invite The Usual Suspects I'm going to go for Adele Alex as I said this part is optional and we want to set this for 2 to 3:00 p.m. and we want to make sure that this teams meeting slider is toggled on and then we can click on send if we reopen it up we can see all of the information in there for a teams meeting that is it that is this exercise I hope you gotten okay with that and I will see you in the next section Microsoft One drive for business is a cloud-based storage and file sharing service provided by Microsoft as part of its Suite of productivity tool for businesses and organizations it's designed to facilitate collaboration and enable secure document storage synchronization and the sharing of files within a business or organizational environment now one drive for business is distinct from the personal version of one drive which is intended for individual users while both services offer cloud storage and file sharing capabilities one drive for business is specifically tailored for Enterprise use and includes addition features to meet the needs of organizations some of the key features of one drive for business include storage and synchronization users can store files and documents in the cloud accessible from any device with an internet connection files can also be synchronized across multiple devices ensuring the latest version is always available one drive for business allows users to easily share files and folders with colleagues both within and outside their organization it supports real time time co-authoring enabling multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously security and compliance Microsoft prioritizes Security in one drive business employing robust encryption and other measures to protect data it also integrates with Microsoft 365 security and compliance features allowing organizations to enforce policies manage access controls and meet regulatory requirements integration with Microsoft 365 one drive for business is tightly integrated with other Microsoft 365 applications that we all know and love like word excel PowerPoint and SharePoint this integration allows for seamless collaboration and enables users to access files directly within these applications Version Control and Recovery One driver business automatically tracks versions of files allowing users to revert to previous versions if required deleted files can be easily recovered covered from the recycle bin reducing the risk of accidental data loss one drive for business offers different storage capacities depending on the subscription plan and can be accessed through web browsers desktop applications and mobile apps providing flexibility and accessibility across devices and platforms one drive is Microsoft's offering when it comes to cloud storage so if you've ever used an application like maybe Google Drive then one drive Works in pretty much the same way now if cloud storage is a completely new concept to you the way to think of it is like this historically we have our files stored in the C drive on our PC and those are very much local to our own PC so if I wanted to share let's say a word document for example with my colleague down the corridor the way that we used to do that was to Simply attach it to an email and send it off but that does come with its disadvantages with cloud storage we can save up into the cloud which is effectively very similar to an external drive and other people have access to that storage making it really easy to share files we can also do things like co-author documents spreadsheets presentations using one drive as well so multiple people can jump into the same file and we can see the changes that they're making in real time and the basis for all of that is knowing how to save our files into one drive and that's what we're going to explore in this lesson now in terms of accessing one drive when you install Microsoft 365 part of the setup process is to set up one drive so it will walk you through the steps you need to take if you find yourself in a situation where you have downloaded Microsoft 365 but you don't have one drive you can simply click on the start menu and search for one drive and you should see this thing here at the top of the list one drive app if you double click to open that up that will then walk you through the setup process process and with one drive you can have personal accounts and you can also have business accounts as well for example I have both because I have a personal email address but I also have a business email address and I like to keep my personal documents separate from my business documents and another important thing worth noting about one drive is that we can work with it online through the portal or we can synchronize it with our local PC and work with our cloud files within file explorer I'm talk more about that a little bit later on for the time being let's start out by taking a look at one drive online again we're starting from the Microsoft 365 Hub we're going to click on our app launcher and open up one drive so this is what the interface looks like on the left hand side we have our navigation menu I'm currently clicked on home and within home we can see the recent files that we've saved or accessed through one drive I have some filter buttons at the top so if I'm just interested in taking a look at Excel files I can use that that filter or I can look at all of my files notice just above we can create new documents directly from within one drive which is really useful or we can upload any files or folders that maybe we have on our C drive so if I have a file that's stored off to my desktop that only I can see and I want to share that with other people I could upload the file from my desktop nice and straightforward I then have a my files link so if I click on that it's going to show me all of my files that are private to me and if you take a look at this list we have a mixture of folders and also documents in this case I've got two spreadsheets in here now the information that we can see in these file lists is I can see here the date that this file was modified who it was modified by the file size and the sharing status so you'll see that most of these are private to me but the last file here the product list I've actually shared this with two other people Adele and Grady we have a sh shared link just here so this is going to show you any files that have been shared with you so I can see here that Adele has shared meeting notes with me and I can see that through this shared area I then have an area here for any files that I've marked as a favorite so if we go back to my files notice as I hover over this Excel file I get a little star here if I click on this it's going to add it into my favorites and then finally we have our recycle bin and this is where you can find files that you've deleted so very simple navigation now let's go back to my files again and take a closer look at what we have in here if we want to move through our folder structure we can click on for example notebooks and it's going to take you into that folder and you can see we have a breadcrumb trail at the top which helps us easily get back to where we were I can click on my files to go back a step also notice that with the documents so let's go for product list if I click on the actual name it's going to open up that file in Excel online so remember we have online versions of all of our applications as well and I can now work on that file and my changes will be automatically saved and that is another really important feature of one drive you no longer need to remember to save your files because it's automatically saving back to the cloud all the time some other things that we have in here if we hover over any of our files we get a few other options we know what the star is that's the favorite but we also have a share option just here and if we click the three dots we have a whole menu with loads of other options as well for example I can open this Excel file within the browser like we just did or if I have the desktop version of excel installed on my PC I can choose to open it in that instead and working with this file in either of these is pretty much identical everything saves back to the cloud I can preview the file I've got another way to share it I can copy the link I can manage access delete it move move it all different kinds of things from this menu you can also see in the top right hand corner we have some options for sorting so I can sort by type name modified I'm currently just sorting my files in ascending order we can choose to display in a list in a compact list which gives it slightly less room or we can display as tiles so this is very much personal preference now another really important button that we have in here and again we're going to talk about this in another lesson is the sync button just here because I mentioned that even though we are working in one drive online we can also synchronize our files to our PC to make them a bit easier to access through file explorer so we're definitely going to come back to this button a bit later on let's just finish up this lesson by discussing this quick access area on the left hand side notice what we have underneath here we have some of our groups and teams that we've set up for example if I click on Project Alpha you can see there I have two folders if I click on General I've got three documents stored in there and these are actually files that have been shared within teams so project Alpha is feeding through from Microsoft teams so I can see those files and if we want to check that we can open up teams and if we scroll down to the bottom project Alpha Team at the bottom General Channel if we jump across to the file section by using the navigation menu at the top you can see there are the same files so things we share within teams will effectively feed through to one drive as well and you can see that this is linked through to teams because if we now take a look at the buttons that we have running horizontally across the top you can see one of them there is goto channel so it's going to allow you to jump directly to the channel where these documents were shed so that's a quick run through of the one drive interface when you're working online if you're new to one drive or even the concept of cloud storage knowing how to work with your files in the portal or on your desktop can seem a little bit confusing at first so in this lesson we're going to demystify how it all works and how everything links together so again we're starting out from our Microsoft 365 portal now what you'll immediately notice is that if you look at the App Launcher on the left hand side and let's just click to open that up you can see that we have our Microsoft Office applications in here so I'm talking mainly about the applications that we all know and love and use on a regular basis so things like word excel and PowerPoint in these applications we use them heavily to create documents spreadsheets and presentations now if I was to open up the word application from within the portal the thing that you'll notice immediately is that it does look a little bit different to what you might be used to and we're just going to create a blank docent dou so you can see what word online looks like and that is the key here when we access our applications from the online portal we're actually accessing the online version of Word the online version of Excel and these versions are slightly more limited than the full desktop versions that you might be used to working with now you can see immediately that whilst we still have this ribbon style structure it is a bit of a different layout we have a much more simplified ribbon now it is worth noting that you can change this so it looks a little bit more like the desktop version if you go all the way over to the right hand side notice this little drop- down arrow that says ribbon display options if we click this we can choose to use the classic ribbon as opposed to the single line ribbon so if you prefer something that looks a little bit more familiar then you can switch to that now even when we're working with the classic ribbon one thing to note is that this isn't the full version of Word there are still some things that we can't can't do in the online version that we can do in the full version and one that Springs to mind is mail merge notice that we don't have a mailings tab at the top here so the idea of these online applications that you can access from really wherever you have an internet connection is that we can do most of the things that we're going to need to do when we're on the go for example if I'm on a train and I want to work on a document I can simply open it up from the office online portal and I can start to make my amendments so we have anywhere anytime access to all of our files if I was doing something a little bit more hardcore that involved more advanced word features I'd probably leave that until I was back at my desk and I had access to the full version now the other thing to note here is that you don't just get the online versions of the applications with your Microsoft 365 subscription if you do want to download the full versions onto your desktop if you go to your portal homepage notice you have a an install apps button over on the right hand side this is going to allow you to install the full versions of all of the apps and you can then pin them down the bottom to your taskbar and work with them in the normal way so how does everything link together we've got the online portal versions We have the desktop versions how do we save and get everything to synchronize well that is where one drive comes in so if we go back to the word document this blank document that we just created a couple of things to note here check out the title of the document it currently says document six so this is a really generic document name that all blank documents will have if we want to rename this to something more meaningful we don't need to go to file and save as we can simply click where it says document 6 and type in a new name and I'm just going to call this Debs document and you can see underneath the location where this file is going to be stored and this location is one drive if I wanted to save it to a different folder other than one drive documents I could go to file save as and I can save it as something completely different and choose a completely different folder so once you have your file saved into one drive it will then synchronize so I'm just going to type some junk text into this document let's just type in equals and I'm going to do my little Rand trick here this will just give me a few paragraphs of dummy text I have my text in here now in order to get this to save I don't need to do anything that's right no more pressing controls no more going to file save everything saves automatically back to the cloud and you can see the little Cloud icon in the title bar here next to Deb's document so I can simply close this document back down again safe in the knowledge that all of my changes have been saved and if I scroll down to the homepage I should see that that document is now at the top I can just simply click it again to reopen it in word online now what does that look like in the full version of Word well let's open up the desktop version and take a look so I'm going to go down to my taskbar and I'm just going to open up word and what you'll see again if we scroll down to Recon there is the document that we just created in the online version if I open it in the full version of Word it's going to have all of my changes in there so I could create this document when I'm on my phone on the train and then when I get back to my desk I can simply open it in the full version and carry on working in it so the whole process is really seamless now I'm going to apply some formatting let's go bold let's change the text to red again I can see that it's saving at the top it now says saved so I can simply close this down and once again if I was now on the train coming home from work and I wanted to see those changes I can simply open up the portal find Deb's document let's click to open it and all of my my changes are going to be in there you can see the red font that we've just applied now this synchronization only happens if we're saving our files into cloud storage in this case one drive so that is kind of how one drive sits in the middle there and is so important when it comes to keeping all of your documents up to date no matter where you've edited them from so far in this section we've very much been focused focusing on how we can access our files through one drive online but I did mention a couple of lessons ago that we can also access our one drive files through file explorer because if you think about it this way if you're sitting at your desk you don't really want to have to log into your Microsoft 365 online portal in order to access any of the files that you have stored in one drive so to make it a bit easier we can synchronize our one drive with our PC and access all of our files and folders from within file explorer which makes the whole process a lot simpler so how do we actually get that to synchronize now before we get onto that topic let me show you very quickly what my file explorer looks like so I have mine open right now and you'll notice at the top I have Deb personal and Deb train it now limited that's my company now I have two here because I have a personal Outlook account for my personal email and that is simply a free account now it's worth noting that even with a free outlook.com account or if you're as old as me a hotmail.com account you get a certain amount of free one drive storage included in that and at the time of writing this course that was 5 gig but I also have another account and this one is a business account so this is an account that I pay for I have a business standard subscription and this is where I store all of my business related files so you can have have two separate one drive accounts on your PC now what you see in here in file explorer will basically reflect what you see in your online portal so if I click on documents you can see I have a few folders and I have a few files in here so let's jump across to the online portal for this account and make sure that everything is the same so I'm back in the portal now and I've actually switched to my train it now limited account and you can see here I'm in the documents folder and have exactly the same folders and files that you can see in file explorer and if I was to create a new document just here let's just do a quick Word document and we'll just type test in here we'll give it a quick name I'm going to call it Deb test and hit enter you can see that that's saving back to the cloud so I can now see that document sitting just here but it's also going to synchronize to file explorer so let's jump back across there and see if that's worked and I can see yes there is the file I can doubleclick to open this file as I normally would and I can carry on working within this file and any changes that I make are automatically saved back up to the cloud now with all of this activity all of this saving back to the cloud it's sometimes a good idea to be able to see the synchronization status and other information about your one drive and what you'll notice is that if you go back to your desktop and take a look at your taskbar notice over on the right hand side I have two little Cloud icons and that's because I have two one drive accounts so for example this one here the blue one is the one that represents my business One Drive account now if I click on this this is going to show me if all of my files are synced if I've got any errors or issues that I need to resolve and I can see the files that have been synced recently I can also click on open folder if I want to go straight to one drive online I can view them online or I can take a look at my recycle bin now syncing in one drive is an automatic process it's not something that you have to invoke there is a button within the online portal that says sync and we saw that a bit earlier so if for some reason you're finding that your files haven't automatically synced you can manually sync your files as well now the final thing of note in here is the little Cog icon in the top right hand corner this is where we're going to find all of our one drive settings now something that's important to note here is if we click on settings and the account tab this is where we can unlink our PC if we want to so maybe you decide that you don't want to have your file synchronized to file explorer you just want to have them accessible through the online portal you could click unlink this PC in order to do that also this is where you come if you have more than one one Drive account as I mentioned I have two I have personal one and I also have this business one so you can click on add account and it's going to walk you through the process of adding that second account in which will then add the second Cloud icon in the status bar where you can access your settings for your personal one drive another thing to know is that you don't necessarily have to synchronize all of your folders to your PC so if you don't have a great deal of space on your PC and you don't want to sync absolutely everything that you have saved in one drive you could click on choose folders and then go through and specifically select which folders you're interested in having access to on your PC and keep everything else in cloud storage another important aspect of working with one drive is being able to access files on demand now what exactly does that mean well you can see currently I have file explorer open and what you'll notice is that when you do have your files synchronizing in one drive you will have a status column when you're looking at your files in file explorer and notice here that next to some of these files and folders I just have a cloud icon and next to a couple of the other files I have a green tick so what is the difference between these status icons well if your file or folder has a cloud icon next to it it means that that file only exists in the cloud and what I mean by that is that the file is stored in the cloud only it's not stored on your PC if the file has a green tick next to it it means it's accessible in both locations so for example Deb test. dox has a green tick which means that this file is actually stored on my PC's hard drive and it's also stored in the cloud whereas my first spreadsheet. xlsx is not stored on my PC see so it's not taking up any space it's only stored in the cloud now the difference that you see when you're looking at these files in file explorer is minimal I can still see all of the files that I have saved no matter where they're saved to it just means that if I choose to open my first spreadsheet for example it's going to need to download it from the cloud in order to open it on my PC and all this really means it just takes a couple of extra seconds to open so what is the meaning of all of this well this becomes very important if you start to run out of space on your PC remember hard drives are not unlimited we need to always make sure that we're not at capacity when it comes to the files that we're storing on our PC and if you can imagine if you store all of your files in the cloud and that might be thousands and thousands of files and you have all of those files synchronized to your PC that's going to take up a lot of storage space whereas if we just have the majority of our files stored in the cloud only it means we're freeing up space on our PC and we can simply just double click to download the files that we need as and when we need them so these are all decisions that you're going to need to make remember we can determine which files and folders that we're syncing by clicking on the cloud icon down in the status bar if we go up to the settings tab and into our one drive settings this is where we can choose the folders that we want to sync so current L I'm pretty much making everything available on my PC and in the cloud now as I said this might not be the best way to work it might be that you have specific folders that contain files that you need to have quick access to all the time and those are the only ones that you want to synchronize you can Define that here in order to save yourself a little bit of hard drive space now another thing we can do is if we decide for example that we want Deb test. dox to only be available in the cloud and not on our hard drive we can rightclick on the file and notice we have a free upspace option now as soon as I click this it's going to remove it from the PC and it's just going to store it in the cloud and you can see that icon has now changed from a green tick to a little Cloud icon similarly if I decide that I want to make my first spreadsheet. Exel SX available on my PC I can rightclick and I can choose always keep on this device so that's going to synchronize and then we get a green tick so just be aware of that difference and how you can manage which files you have stored solely in the cloud and which ones you make available on the hard drive of your PC one of the best things about working in Microsoft 365 is the seamless way that we can collaborate with others on files documents we can take any file that we have within Microsoft 365 and share it with colleagues and team members and the coolest thing is that we can utilize co-authoring functionality so what exactly is co-authoring well let's open a file first of all and for this example I'm going to choose this one just here it's a Word document called training information and again this just has some junk text in it for this particular tutorial now we have this open in word and I can go in in and start making edits but maybe I want to collaborate with my colleague Adele what I can do is I can share this document with Adele and then we can both open up this document and work in it at the same time I can see where Adele is currently clicked in the document and I can also see the changes that she's making in real time so this is true co-authoring and negates the need to send files attached to emails backwards and forwards now when it comes to to sharing files with others when you're working in Microsoft 365 there are numerous different places that we can do this now if you already have your document open like I do just here notice that within word online and you will find this within Excel and PowerPoint as well we have a share button in the top right hand corner so I can click this and I can share or I can copy the link now we are going to use this option but before we do let's just go back to the homepage and take a look at where else we can share documents so once again we have training information just here if I have my mouse over this the three dots in the middle will open up the more options menu and you can see that I can share it from here as well now remember this file is essentially stored in one drive and SharePoint so I can share from either of those applications as well so if we quickly open up one drive there is the file and once again I can click on the three dots and I can share it from here so numerous different resources for sharing with others now we're going to go back to word online and we're going to click the share button in the top right hand corner now the first thing I want to do here is I want to determine what kind of access I want to give Adell so I'm going to say people I choose because I only want to limit it to her so let's click on apply and then I can just specify that I want to share with Adele I could share with more people just by typing their names in I could then type a message I'm not going to just to save a bit of time and then I can send that off to Adele now what Adele is going to receive is basically an Outlook email with a link to this document when she clicks on that link it's going to jump her straight into this live original document that I currently have open so let's give her a few minutes to open up the email and click on the link and we should see Adele arrive very short shortly and check it out there she is I can see her initials within the document so that is showing me where she's currently clicked and I can also see when she types and Updates this document in real time so this is true collaboration reversely wherever I'm clicked and wherever I'm making changes Adele is going to be able to see my initials in the version that she's working in so this is what we refer to as co-authoring and you could have more than one other person working in this document you might have an entire team of people five six seven people so this is a really efficient way to work and really cuts down on the amount of documents that we're passing back and forth between team members via email attachments another thing you'll also notice is that you will be able to see the profile photo of anybody who's currently in this document with you so if you take a look at the top next to comments you can see Adele's little icon just there if I hover over it's telling me that she's currently clicked on page one and I can even jump to her location in the document and the final Point worth noting is that co-authoring is only available when you're working in the online version of your office applications deleting files in one drive will move them to the recycle bin but the good news is if you accidentally delete a file or you need to get a file back you can store the file from the recycle pin back to the original folder that it was deleted from for example I'm in one drive I'm currently clicked on the my files folder in the left hand pane now if I scroll down I can see I've just got a few random books here some Excel workbooks book one book two and book three and maybe I want to delete all of these files so there's a couple of different ways that I can do this if I haven't actually selected the file I can simply hover over it click on the three dots and I'm going to find a delete option in the menu the alternative method would be to select the file by clicking in the circle to the left and I can choose delete from the horizontal menu bar at the top if you want to delete multiple just make sure you select them first so I'm going to delete these three workbooks let's click the delete button it's going to ask me to confirm so I'm going to say yes I want to delete these and those have been deleted and move to the recycle bin now we can find our bin in that leftand menu again right at the bottom botom here underneath favorites so if we click on recycle bin we should be able to see everything that we've deleted recently and you can see right at the top there there are my three files so the good news is that they don't get permanently deleted immediately they'll move to here and then you have a specific period of time where you can restore these files if you need to now the retention period is different depending on what type of Microsoft account you have so if you have a personal Microsoft account you have a period of 30 days days in which to restore these files before they're permanently removed from the system if you have a work or school account you have 93 days which seems a little bit of a random time period so it's a bit longer if you have one of those accounts so let's pretend that I made a mistake and I actually do want to keep book one what we can do here is select the file and check out the horizontal menu bar we only have two options delete or restore if I click on restore it's going to move that back to the folder that I deleted it from so if I go back to my files I can see there is the file back in my files list and that is all there is to it so pretty simple to delete and restore files when you're working in one drive it's time now for us to do exercise three where we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section of the course and this section was all about one drive so so the first thing I'd like you to do is to download the files practice 1. dox and practice 2. xlsx from the exercise files folder and I'd like you to upload both of these files into one drive and I don't really mind which folder you upload them into I'd then like you to open practice one. dox in word online and make some edits once you've closed down that word file I'd like you to synchronize one drive to your computer now I've marked this step as optional as I am aware that a lot of people will already have done this so if you have you can skip over this step I'd then like you to make the files practice 1. dox and practice 2. xlsx available online only that is it for this exercise I hope you're gotten okay with that and if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching the first part of this exercise was to download practice 1. dox and practice 2. xlsx from the exercise file folder so once you've done that they should go into your downloads folder and you can then upload them into one drive now I said that I don't mind which folder you upload them to so I'm going to upload mine to my files and I'm going to put them in the training files folder so all we need to do is go to the upload button we can select files there are the two files practice one and practice two let's select both of them and click on open next I asked you to open practice 1. dox in word online and make some edits so I'm going to click on the three dots I'm going to go to open open in browser to open it in word online so that's going to open you can see this is just a test template that we've got here and I asked you to make some changes so I'm going to select this first paragraph I'm going to make the text red and let's select the second paragraph let's just make the text bold remember we don't need to save when we're working in word online because everything saves automatically back to one drive let's let's close down the file I then asked you to synchronize one drive to your computer if you haven't done it already remember if you have done this previously then you can skip over this step if you haven't all you need to do is go up to the menu bar and click on the sync button to start that synchronization process and once the synchronization is complete you should find that you have your folder in the folder list in file explorer that corresponds to the files that you have in one drive online if you notice mine are exactly the same in both locations I then asked you to make sure that practice one. dox and practice 2. xlsx are available online only now notice both of these have a green check mark next to them which means that they are downloaded to my PC now it might be that you don't have this green check next to your files if you don't you can right click and choose always keep on this device because what we're essentially doing when we make files available online only is freeing up space on our PC so if you do have files that are stored directly on this device you can rightclick and go to free up space and that will make them available online only that was it for this exercise I hope you gotten okay with that and I will see you in the next section Microsoft 365 groups are a collaboration feature within the Microsoft 365 Suite of productivity tools they provide a way for users to work together and share resources such as emails calendars files and more with a specific group of people and if you want to know why they are so useful I'm about to tell you Microsoft 365 groups provide seamless collaboration they allow users to collaborate on projects or tasks by providing a centralized space space for communication and sharing group members can easily access shared resources and stay updated on group activities and with groups we can also have shared email conversations each Microsoft 365 group has its own unique email address allowing members to send and receive messages within the group this simplifies communication and ensures that all relevant discussions are centralized in one place groups can also have a shared calendar this enables members to schedule and coordinate meetings events and deadlines it provides visibility into the availability of group members making it easier to plan and collaborate effectively there's also a huge document collaboration thread to Microsoft 365 groups groups have a shared file Library through Microsoft SharePoint members can store co-author and collaborate on documents spreadsheets and presentations this simplifies Version Control and ensures everyone has access to the most up-to-date files and Microsoft 365 groups really enable a team Centric approach to working they allow members to quickly create and manage groups based on projects departments or other shared interests and this structure helps organize and streamline collaboration efforts within an organization and if you are a Microsoft 365 administrator you can manage access permissions for Microsoft 365 groups ensuring that only authorized members can join and contribute to the group's resources so it helped maintains a level of data security and privacy within the organization and possibly my favorite element of Microsoft 365 groups are their integration with other Microsoft 365 applications and services such as Microsoft teams planner OneNote and Yammer this integration enhances productivity and provides a comprehensive collaboration experience so in this section we're going to dive into Microsoft 365 groups and I'm going to show you exactly how they work overall Microsoft 365 groups offer a powerful and efficient way for teams and organizations to collaborate communicate and share resources enabling improved teamwork and productivity the first thing you're going to need to know is how to access and also how to create new Microsoft 365 groups and the good news is you can do this from within Outlook so I've opened up Outlook online from the portal I'm just in my mail account at the moment and you can see I have all of my mail folders and then right at the bottom I have a section called groups so let's just collapse up some of these folders to make these groups a bit easier to see so you can see here that I have four groups already set up and I'm I'm going to go into a bit more detail about how these integrate with other applications a bit later on in this section for now we just want to focus on how we can create a new group and by looking at this it should be fairly obvious we have three Links at the bottom we can create a new group we can discover groups so that's groups that have already been set up within our company and we can also manage our groups so we're going to create a brand new group and we're going to stick with our project Juliet project Delta and project Alpha theme we're going to create a new group called Project Bravo so let's click on new group the first thing we need to do is give our group a name so let's type in Project Bravo Now notice just below where we have email address Microsoft 365 has assigned a unique email address to this group so you can see here it says Project Bravo at and then we have the tenant that we're attached to now I'm attached to a test tenant just here yours will probably be your company name now the cool thing about this automatically generated email address is that if you just want to send an email to all group members you can simply use the email address below and that works for people outside of the group as well as inside of the group you can add an optional description just to save a bit of time I'm not going to do that but it is worth adding in a description so people know exactly what this group is about and then we get to set our privacy settings so you can see currently mine is set to private so this is a private group now what that basically means is that it's not discoverable outside of anybody who's been invited to the group so in a moment we're going to go in and we're going to add people to this group and those are the only people who are going to be able to find this group or search for this group if you recall over in this leftand menu we had a discover groups option just here and that will basically allow you to click on it and discover any groups that are public within your your organization and request to join those groups with a private group we can't do that now I'm going to change the privacy settings here let's click on edit and I'm going to change this to public so it says anyone in your organization can see what's inside so this is completely open to everybody within my organization I can choose the language for group rated notifications obviously I'm going to keep that on English United Kingdom and then we can choose to have this checkbox select Ed so members will receive all group conversations and events into their inboxes so what this basically means is that anytime something happens within the group all of the group members will receive a notification and I would say give this a go leave it ticked first of all but if you find you're getting too many notifications you might want to come in and just untick this option let's click on create to create a group so our group has been created again if you cast your eyes over to the left hand side you can see we now have Project Bravo at the top here here but it's giving us the chance to add members to this group so I'm going to add a few people let's add Adele I'm going to add Grady I'm going to add about seven people here so I'm just going to go through and add a few people and I think that's enough so I've now got seven members as well as myself included in this group let's click the add button at the bottom and there we go it is a simple as that so now over in the left hand pane I can click on Project Bravo and this is my new group if this is the first time that you're creating the group you're going to get this little popup so you can have a little bit of an explore I'm going to say not now and this is where we can come to work with this group and we're going to go into a lot of the features of this group throughout the balance of this section the final thing I want to point out is you can see at the top here it says public group we have eight members if I click on where it says eight members we can see all of the members of this group so that is how simple it is to create a Microsoft 365 group in the next few lessons we'll take a look at how we can send emails share files and do lots of other cool things in the last lesson we saw how to create a group called Project Bravo in this lesson I'm going to show you how simple it is to send emails to that particular group so I'm currently clicked on the Project Bravo group in the leftand menu and the way that you need to think about this is it's just like having an email inbox you can see in the main body here any emails that have been sent to the group so if I click on this first one because we only have one this is the default email that you'll get when you set up a new group so it just kind of gives you some guidance as to how to start a conversation how to add to a team site how to share files and how to connect other applications so I would recommend that if you are new to groups that you go through each of these and just have a little read now everybody who has access to this group so the eight members that I've added are going to be able to see this group underneath groups in that leftand menu so everybody is going to be able to see exactly what I'm looking at just here now if we want to have conversations within our group about Project Bravo so everyone is going to be able to see any emails that have been sent to Project Bravo meaning that everybody is up to date on the latest happenings within the group now I'm going to quickly switch back to my inbox so let's expand folders out and I'm going to go to inbox you can see here right at the top of the list I also have a new notification that I've joined the Project Bravo group so if I want to email Project Bravo it's a simple case of creating a brand new email and typing Project Bravo into the two field now a word of warning here if I type in Project Bravo you can see it's not actually recognizing it in the drop- down list and you might find this if this is a group that you've just created did and then you immediately try to email the group as I'm doing here it does take a little while for Outlook to recognize it in that drop- down list so don't be disheartened it is actually there you can simply click on the two field and if we go to the global address list and scroll down to where we have all of our groups there it is just there Project Bravo so I'm going to click on the plus and click on Save now notice here next to where we have Project Bravo we have a little plus symbol now if i c click on this it's going to show me all of the individual members of the group now this is important because this really changes how this email is sent if I click on the plus it's going to show me all of the individual members and then when I type in a subject and a message and click on send it's not going to send it to the Project Bravo group it's going to send this message to each of the individual team members now if you want to do that that's fine but if you want it to appear are actually in the Project Bravo group then don't click on that plus so I'm just going to send this email to trash I'm going to discard the draft we're going to create a new email again and we're going to send it to the Project Bravo group so let's just add that back in click on Save I'm going to add a quick subject and I'm also going to add a message so now when I click on send that's going to send it through to the group and it will be visible by all group members so it's a small difference but a really important difference because if you just send it to the individuals it's not going to show up in the Project Bravo group you can see now there is the new mail and everybody who's a member of this group can see this mail now the final point to mention is that people who are outside of your organization can also email the group directly and that is because each group that we create has its own individual email address so if we click on the Project Bravo icon just here there is the email address so what we can do here is we can copy the email address close down this window and open up a brand new email and then in the two field we can simply crl V to paste that in compose our mail and send it through so really simple to email a group from outside of your organization the very final thing to point out here is that also within this group we have a send email button so if I click on this you can see that it automatically puts into the two- field Project Bravo so this is by far the quickest method to use if you want to send an email to the entire group in the last couple of lessons we've been very much focused on working with Microsoft 365 groups within the Outlook inbox we've seen how to create to group Project Bravo and we've seen how we can send and receive messages and you can see that since the last lesson I've had a reply from Alex and I can see that he really likes the new group now aside from having this kind of shared email inbox for all of the group members we can also have a shared group calendar and these are beneficial because it means we can have a specific calendar set up for a specific group of people in this case all of the members of Project Bravo and we can schedule according to the group members free time so in this lesson we're going to see how we can set up a shared calendar based off of a Microsoft 365 group and this is super simple so the first thing we want to do here is we want to jump over to our calendar area of Outlook so in that leftand menu I'm just going to click on calendar to switch across now underneath the mini calendar view this is where we have access to our different calendars so you can see that I have access to my calendar and also I'm showing the UK holiday calendar as well now if I also want to show a shared calendar for Project Bravo all I need to do is click on add calendar just above and then we have lots of different types of calendar that we can add now Project Bravo is a group that we've just set up it exists in the company directory so we're going to choose add from directory from this leftand menu we can choose an account to search from because remember you might have multiple accounts attached to your outlook now in this case I only have one that is this one just here so now I can select a person a group or a resource from our organization's directory to view the associated calendar so this is simply a case of typing in Project Bravo there it is at the bottom let's select it and then we can choose where to add this calendar to so if I click the drop down here I can add it to my calendars other calendars or people's calendars so because this is a group I want to separate it from my calendars I'm going to put it in other calendars let's click on ADD and there we go you can see at the bottom here we now have a new group called groups and there we have the Project Bravo calendar selected if I were to deselect my calendar and the holiday calendar I'm now just viewing Project Bravo I can start scheduling items in this calendar and it just means that everybody else who has access to this calendar which is currently all of Project Bravo is going to see exactly the same thing when they open up their Outlook they're going to see groups at theot botom Project Bravo and they can see anything that's been scheduled another great feature of Microsoft 365 groups is the ability to easily share files each group that you create comes with its own SharePoint file library and we can upload files that exist on our PC to that library or we can create new files from directly within SharePoint and share them with the group members so to access our file Library if we click on the group Project Bravo in this case and jump up to the three dots let's click them notice we have an option in here called site and you'll notice that the icon is a SharePoint icon because that's effectively what we're connecting to this is sort of giving you an idea as to how all of the applications link together in Microsoft 365 so if we click on site it's going to jump us across to the specific SharePoint site for this Microsoft 365 group and you can see at the top there we have the title Project Bravo Now if we click on the documents Link in the leftand menu that's going to jump us across to the SharePoint file library for this particular group so if I have a file that I want to upload I can click upload and I can upload a file or a folder or I can create a brand new document from here so that's what we're going to do we're going to create a Word document it's going to open in word online and I'm just going to type in some test text so I'm going to do my little dummy text trick just here just to get something in there and we're going to rename this file so at the top here where we have just document which is the generic name if we click we can then rename this to something else so we'll call this project Bravo Team document and you can see underneath it's going to save it into the Project Bravo folder shared documents click away and it's going to rename that file now everything synchronizes when we're working in Microsoft 365 so if I close down word I should find now that I can see that document sitting there again it hasn't refreshed with the new title but if we just quickly refresh the browser we should find that that new title pulls through which it does so let's close down SharePoint and jump back to our Outlook group now the other thing that you'll notice is next to send email we actually have a group files area if I click on group files this is going to show all of the files that have been shared within this group and you can see here there is the document that I just created so everybody who's a member of this group can now see this document open it and work on it in word online and everybody can see those changes in real time we can also see in the other half of the screen the document library that we were just in so you don't necessarily have to click on the three dots and go to site you can just click on my files and you can upload from here or you can create new documents from here as well so everything feeds through really nicely and of course the other way that you can share files with group members is simply to email them as an attachment to the group so if I go back to my inbox and create a new email I'm going to send this email to Project Bravo and you can see it is now pulling through so I can select it from here I'm going to add a subject and then I'm going to attach a file now there are a couple of different ways that you can attach files I could go up to the paperclip icon and I could choose one of the suggested files normally one of your most recent files or I can browse my computer or I can upload from one drive but the more interesting way is if I press forward slash in the body of the message again that's going to show me my last files and I can choose a file this way so let's say I want to send the training spreadsheet I can do that it's going to create a link and then I can send that through so now if I click on the group Project Bravo you can see there is the email message if I click on it I have easy access to that spreadsheet and I can simply click on the link to open that up now it's worth noting that if we go back to our groups if I click on group files I'm not going to be able to see that Excel spreadsheet listed here because I just shared a link to that spreadsheet sheet if I wanted to effectively upload this to the group SharePoint Library I would simply need to go back to the document and I can change where I'm saving it into so I can move this to Project Bravo and I'm going to say move here and that's effectively going to upload it to the SharePoint file Library you can see evidence of that in the URL it now says my sharepoint.net the training spreadsheet so what I'm trying to illustrate there is that if you do attach a link to a file and send it to the group it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to see it immediately under the group files it needs to be saved into the shared file library in SharePoint in order for it to be accessible but that's it that's a couple of easy methods when it comes to sharing files in Microsoft 365 groups connectors allow us to connect other third-party apps and also Microsoft 365 apps to a group for example if you want notifications to come in based off of an RSS feed so maybe you want news notifications to come into the group then you could set up a connector to the specific RSS feed if you may be manage projects in something like jira or assana you could set up a connector to either of those applications to receive notifications into the group or if you want to connect to another application within Microsoft 365 maybe you want to receive all notifications that are related to your Project Bravo yamama Community you can set that up as well and that's exactly what we're going to do here now in order to get access to your connectors for a Microsoft 365 group you just need to make sure that you're clicked on the group click the three dots and jump into settings now towards the bottom here you're going to have this little section called connectors and you can see here it says manage or add your favorite services to this group so if we click on connectors it's going to open up a brand new web page and it's going to show us all of the different connectors that we can add now this is a very long list we have a mixture of Microsoft 365 applications and also third-party applications to make it a little bit easier to find what you're looking for they are divided down into categories so if looking for something specifically related to analytics you could add that in CRM customer support so on and so forth now I'm just going to click on all because I know that the one that I want to add is fairly close to the top so we're going to scroll down and you can see there we have yamama so if I add this as a connector we're going to receive updates from the yamama network that we select into our Microsoft 365 group inbox so this is pretty cool if I had a Project Bravo Y Community which we will set up a bit later on and I want to make sure that the entire team is up to dat with all of the going on within that Community I could create a connection to that Yama Community to receive those notifications into the group so we're going to click on ADD and it's going to ask us to log in and you will be asked to log in no matter what application you select now I'm going to select continue to authenticate with yamma and then we simply need to go through and set up the types of notifications that we want to receive so this is the account that I want to use it's my account and then I can search for groups that I want to follow now if I click in here you can see it's showing me existing yamma communities that I have set up so let's say we want to receive notifications from the water cooler Community I'm going to get notifications for all messages and if I'm interested in specific posts made by a specific user I could type in their username just here now I'm not in this case I want to see everything I could also refine the notifications that I'm getting by keyword so maybe I only want to receive notifications when somebody posts a message in a yamama community that has the keyword Bravo in it I could specify that just here I can then specify how frequently I want to receive notifications so I could set this up to send notifications every 15 minutes and if you have a lot of activity going on in your yamama community that might be a bit too much I can set it to every hour daily weekly so on and so forth so I'm going to set this to daily and I'm going to click on Save now as soon as I do that you can see that now when we click on the configured section it's telling me that I have yamama configured which is perfect so let's close this down so now because I set this to daily at the end of the day we're going to receive an email in into the Project Bravo Microsoft 365 group that shows us all of the activity that's occurred within that specific Yama Community the water cooler over the last day in the final lesson of this section we're just going to take a look at a couple of things that we haven't looked at yet and we're also going to see how we can manage our groups so we've pretty much seen what most of these buttons do at the top here a final couple of things notice we have a little star icon next to the name Project Bravo if we click this that's going to add this group into our favorites folder in our inbox so this is really just to give you quick and easy access to the group we've seen how we can quickly jump to our group files and the icon next to that is how we can quickly jump to our group calendar when we click the three dots we also have access to a shared notebook and that's a shared one note notebook and also a shared area in Microsoft planner now we haven't spoken about either of these applications so far in this course we are going to talk about those a bit later on so we'll come back and review at that stage we've seen how we can jump to a SharePoint site to view our files in the file library and then finally at the bottom we have settings so if we click to open settings this is how we can manage our group email so at the top here it says choose which group messages to receive in your inbox so this is relating to your personal inbox not the group inbox now because I am following Project Bravo I've got mine set to receive all email and events so I'm going to receive notifications in my personal inbox when things are coming in to Project Bravo Now if you don't like this option you can choose to stop following the Inbox and you have three options just here the harshest one is the bottom one don't receive any group messages so if you select this option you're not going to see any Project Bravo group activity in your personal inbox you could choose to select receive only replies to you so if somebody specifically directs an email to you you're going to get a notification about that alternatively you can receive only replies to you and group events so again this is going to be just people who have replied specifically to you but you're also going to get a notification if there are any group events going on so you have these two different options follow in inbox or stop following in inbox so I'm going to leave this up to you to decide which one is most appropriate for you and how you like to manage your email underneath that we've seen this is how we get to our connectors and then underneath that we can edit the group so if I open this up it's going to allow me to edit different elements of this Microsoft 365 group for example I could change the name to something else I could change the email address I could change the description I can even change the access settings the Privacy level so if I decide that I now want to make this group private I could switch it from public to private very simply and click on Save it's also worth noting that if you want to delete this group this is also where you're going to find this option so let's click on Save and I'm actually going to go back into settings again and back into edit group because the other tab that we have up here is the members tab so this is where we can see who the owner is of the group currently that is me and it's also where we can see a list of everybody who is a member of this group and if we wanted to make somebody a co-owner we can definitely do that from here as well so if I want to make Adele a co-owner of this group and that just really means that you have a little bit more access to do things in the group such as owners are the only ones who can delete a group we could click the drop down and I could bump up Adele's access to owner as well so now we are co-owners of this group I can also add additional members directly from here as well and if I want to remove people from this group I can click on the cross next to their name so let's remove Aire click on yes and he's now gone and finally if we go back to the about tab if you want to add an icon or an image to represent this group you can do that from here as well simply by clicking on the little camera icon so I'm to click here let's upload a photo and I'm just going to choose this one here welcome on board there we go that'll do let's click on okay and you can see that that group now has a little bit more personality let's jump back into our settings because we have two more options in here so we can create rules on this particular group and rules are things like if an email comes in with a specific keyword move it to this specific folder so it's exactly the same as adding rules to your outlook inbox and the final option that we have within settings is to Simply leave the group now that's fine if you are a member of the group if you are the owner of the group you need to make sure that you have a co-owner before you leave the group so if I was the sole owner and I tried to leave the group it's not going to let me now remember I made Adele a co-owner so I can theoretically just simply click on leave and I can leave that group but every group must have an owner so just bear that in mind if you're trying to leave a group where you are the only owner so that is pretty much it that is all there is to Microsoft groups hopefully now that you're at the end of this section you can see how useful they can be when it comes to connecting and collaborating with team members that belong to specific groups it's time now for exercise 4 and in this exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section of the course about Microsoft 365 groups so the first thing that I'd like you to do is simply to create a Microsoft 365 group and name it QA testing group I'd like you to invite members to the group and this step is optional depending on whether you have people to invite or not remember you can always invite one of your own email addresses I'd then like you to practice sending an email to the group using the unique email address so this part of the exercise is really just testing if you know where to go to find that unique address I'd then like you to share the file practice one. dox with the group and I'd like you to make sure that you know how to access the SharePoint site and the team notebook for this Microsoft 365 group so a few different steps there if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first part of this exercise was simply to create a new Microsoft 365 group so in the groups area we're going to click on new group our group name is QA testing group I'm going to leave this on a private group and we simply need to click on the create button I then asked you to invite some members and again you may or may not have people to invite you could use one of your own email addresses I'm just going to invite a few people from this list like so and click on ADD I then asked you to send an email to the group using the unique email address so this was really just a test if you knew where to go to find that email address so if we click on the group name QA testing group and then click on the group name at the top here that's going to open up this little window and there is the unique email address address so I'm going to click to copy this email address we can then create a brand new email and simply contrl V to paste it in we can add a subject and a message and then send that through the next thing I asked you to do was to share the file practice one. dox with the group members so to do this we can go to group files and we can upload a file so let's select files and you should have these still in your downloads folder from when you downloaded them from the exercise files folder in a previous lesson so I'm going to select practice one let's click on open and that's going to upload into the document library for this group and the final step was just to ensure that you know how to jump across quickly to the SharePoint site associated with this group and also the team notebook and we do both of those things by clicking on the three dots we can jump across to the SharePoint site by clicking on site there it is QA testing group and we can access our team notebook by doing something similar but this time we're selecting notebook so that is it that is all I need you to do for this exercise I hope you gotten okay with that and I will see you in the next section if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get the course exercise files and follow a along with this video click over there and click over there to watch more videos on YouTube from Simon says it

Channel: Simon Sez IT

Views: 33,255

Keywords: microsoft 365, outlook, microsoft outlook, outlook tips and tricks, outlook calendar, office 365, outlook tutorial, outlook calendar sharing, windows 365, microsoft office 365, productivity, microsoft teams, onedrive, microsoft onedrive, how to use onedrive, onedrive tutorial, how to use microsoft onedrive, onedrive vs google drive, onedrive sync, onedrive for business, what is onedrive, using onedrive, onedrive app, microsoft 365 groups, microsoft onedrive tutorial, microsoft

Id: zYn-qyN5A3E

Length: 214min 20sec (12860 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024