A mobile device must have

A while back I wrote an article about how I use OneNote. You can find it here:

It showed how to get a personal OneNote notebook up and running with Office 365 and access it on all your devices. It also detailed the process that I use to create my shared ‘Daybook’ notebook which I basically use as a replacement for a traditional pad and pen.

One of the must have add-ons for OneNote in my books is Office Lens from Microsoft. The way Microsoft tout it is as a OneNote scanner for your pocket.

You start by downloading the Office Lens app on your mobile device:

Here for Android

Here for iOS

Here for Windows Phone

Once you have the app on your device you can use it capture things like business cards, white boards and even documents. To do this you simply use the Office Lens app to take a picture of the information. Once captured you can then save it in a variety of locations, including OneNote.

The way I use it is to capture expenses when travelling as you can see in the above screen shot. Here, I’ve taken a picture of a petrol receipt using Office Lens on my mobile and then uploaded that to my cloud shared OneNote notebook. This then makes that available to every device automatically thanks to the syncing wonders of OneNote.

When I return to my desktop, I can bring up the same OneNote notebook and view the receipt. Even better, I can use OneNote pages and sections to categorise the information so I know for example which trip it was part of. Even better, the information inside the receipt has been made searchable. Thus, as the highlight in the above screen shot demonstrates, I have searched for the text ‘invoice’ and OneNote found and highlighted that text inside the receipt (i.e. inside a picture I took on my mobile device!).

Can you imagine how much easier it would be to record all your casual receipts like this? Once they are captured with Office Lens, they can be uploaded to you OneNote notebook saved in the cloud. There they are not only backed up and saved, they are also searchable and easily ordered if required.

It really is amazing at how well Office Lens works with receipts and whiteboards. Combined with cloud based OneNote notebooks it creates a great system for not only capturing but also retaining and organising information for individuals and also for businesses. Image a system where travelling staff can capture their receipts directly into OneNote so they can be processed quickly by admin staff back in the Office.

Think of how much time it takes you or your staff to do paper based expense reports now. Think of all the space consumed by those paper expense reports. Also, what happens to the receipts after they have been processed? How long do they need to be retained for tax purposes? Many receipts are printed on thermal paper which fades over time. That is not good if they need to be retained.

Having a digital copy has so many benefits and combined with cloud based notebooks like OneNote, it can greatly increase the productivity of your staff and your business. The best bit is that both OneNote and Office Lens are already free and if you have Office 365 or OneDrive.com (also free) you can take advantage of cloud synced notebooks to share the information between devices or between a team.

So if you enjoyed my previous OneNote article and are using OneNote synched notebooks, now you can take your productivity to the next level by using Office Lens. You can get even more done in your day by making the capture, retention and sharing of information simple and digital.

Outlook on the web improvements

If you have a look at your Outlook on the web experience in office 365 you might notices some differences. Microsoft has introduced some changes to the interface as well as added new features.

If you now visit Outlook from your Office 365 web portal and select an email you will see a range of menu options now displayed across the top of the page.

You’ll also find new features inside the inbox including the ability to ‘pin’ messages to the top of the list.

A new option called Sweep allows you to more easily create rules to manage your inbox. You simply select the message to action on and the select the Sweep option from the menu across the top of the screen.

Not only do Sweep rules work like traditional inboxes rules but they also have the ability to run automatically if required keeping your inbox organized when you aren’t there or email are flowing in.

The full details about these changes can be found in a recent blog post from Microsoft:

New features coming to Outlook on the web

Which you should take a look at to see all the new features they are incorporating. Hopefully by now you should bee seeing these new features in your Outlook on web, if not, they will be rolling out to you soon.

Office ProPlus User Activation Management

One of the most common requests I hear from Office 365 administrators is the desire to manage each users desktop Office software deployments. Until now only the user could do this in their own portal, but now if you go into the Office 365 admin portal as an administrator and select an active user,

you’ll see a new option on the right called Office installations.

If you then select the Edit hyperlink.

You’ll get a window like the above slide out from the right. In there you see information about the installations of Office desktop software for that user. You will also have the ability to de-activate those installs, just like a user can do on their own via their portal.

A nice addition for administers of Office 365.

Here’s a short video from Microsoft on the feature.

Switching on to PowerBI

One of the most powerful applications just about every business has at their fingertips is Excel. What this product can do is truly amazing when you explore it fully. The downside is that most people use less than ten percentage of the product capabilities.

Some of the more advanced features of Excel are Pivot tables. In essence, these allow you to create basic data cubes to easily slice and dice your raw data to create information that has value and provide insight. Sadly again, few people even know what Pivot tables are, let alone even used them.

The growing demand in our increasing data driven world is having a method of producing meaningful information from a vast array of raw data input sources. Microsoft is providing such a solution in the form of PowerBI.

The latest version of PowerBI from Microsoft is now available in preview for free. You can sign up at:

http://www.powerbi.com

When you do you’ll be presented with some sample Retail Analysis data that look like this:

As interesting as that is it is a little abstract. Where you begin to appreciate the role that PowerBI can play for you is when you select the option to Get Data.

Here you’ll now see a variety of sources that PowerBi can report on. One of the options you’ll see from the above screen shot is Google Analytics web data.

When you connect up your Google Analytics you’ll get a new dashboard, as you see above, with all of the information about your web site. In this case, I’m look at data from my www.anzacsinfrance.com web site.

At the top of the dashboard you’ll see a box into which you can type a free form query. So if I type “total hits” the dashboard automatically shows me the result as you see above.

If I now extend that query to “total hits last month” the result is immediately updated and displayed as shown above.

If I extend that further to “total hits last month in turkey” I see a result of 6 website views from Turkey in the last month.

If I extend that once more to “total hits last month in turkey compared to france” i now get a graph as shown above.

Hopefully, you can see the possibilities and the depth of reporting that is possible. And of course you can pin these queries to your dashboard so they display upon your return.

Apart from the adhoc dashboard you can create multi page reports. The above is an example from my web site data. Again, you can customise these easily in the web browser or download the PowerBI Designer for your desktop.

As you saw earlier, one of the data sources I can use is a plain old Excel file, uploaded from your desktop or saved in OneDrive consumer or OneDrive for Business.

Once the spreadsheet is available to PowerBI, now you can start creating reports based on the Excel Pivot tables I alluded to earlier. You do this by simply dragging and dropping the desired column heading into the appropriate locations (axis, vales, etc). The difference here is that I am doing this in a browser in a way that I can pin the result to a dashboard and report.

I can also now quickly and easily change the style of graph that is display, change the data I report on, create more results on the page or create additional pages effortlessly.

I can also easily share my dashboards with others when they are complete.

Microsoft is announcing more and more options for data sources with PowerBI. One of the upcoming options will be analytics from Office 365 with the soon to be released Office 365 content pack for PowerBI.

Whats new in Office 365 Administration from Microsoft Ignite 2

Which should allow you to produce report from Office 365 like you see in the above screen shot taken from the announcement blog post.

At the core of PowerBi is the concept of data sets. Raw data sets are ordered by Excel style Pivot tables with the results being surfaced through PowerBI. Thus, to get meaningful results you need to understand Excel Pivot tables. If you don’t now might be the time to fire up that version of Excel and start learning!

Hopefully, giving you this small inkling of what is possible with PowerBI will inspire you to dive into the product and learn what it can offer. I know I am and am amazed everyday with what is possible and will be detailing more in upcoming posts. Given that it is also in preview and free to access is an even better reason not to hesitate but to dive in now and power up with PowerBI.

Office 2016 available to first release tenants

The most common method of deploying Office from Office 365 subscriptions is via the Office 365 portal. To do so you select the Cog in the top right and from the menu that appears you select Office 365 settings.

From the options that appear on the left you select Software.

You then see Office 2013 and you select the Install button to kick off the Click to Run install.

BUT, if the tenant has the First Release option enabled and you scroll down a bit you’ll see that you also have the option to install the Office 2016 Preview!

Potential issue here is that if an end user decides to install the Office 2016 Preview then it REPLACES the existing Office 2013 (i.e. no side by side install).

Now Office 2016 is not currently supported by Microsoft (as it says) which may mean it is not a good idea for an organisation. ~~Problem is, I can’t see how to disable this option for end users without turning off First Release (which would remove other features you may want) or disabling Office installs completely.~~

Hopefully, there is a PowerShell command or some option I have overlooked that allows administrators to disable the option for installing Office 2016 Preview. I understand that people on the First Release program want to see the new stuff BUT not sure whether administrators want their users running Office 2016 just yet! At least until it is out of preview.

~~If you know how to disable the Office 2016 Preview option without disabling First Release or Office downloads in general I’d love to hear.~~

Update – I spoke too soon (the ability to control which users get first release features is rolling out as we speak. More in my updated blog post).

Enable Dropbox Integration in Office 365

https://portal.office.com/Home

where you should see the above screen.

Select the Word Online icon.

Word Online will now launch and you should see the splash screen you see above prompting for Dropbox integration.

Select Add Dropbox account and enter yoru Dropbox account details if prompted.

Once you have entered your details you will see in the top a drop down menu with options for OneDrive for Business and Dropbox as shown above.

In the bottom left as well, you will see the above locations you can select to open a file from, OneDrive for Business and Dropbox.

If you select Open from Dropbox you will be able to navigate your Dropbox file locations and select a file.

The first time you select a Dropbox file you’ll be prompted to allow Microsoft Office Online to access Dropbox as shown above.

Select Allow to proceed.

You’ll now be able to edit that document in Word Online.

In the bottom of the window in the middle you will see that any updates you make are Saved to Dropbox automatically.

If you now go into your Dropbox at any time and select an Office document you can elect to open it with the appropriate Office Online application.

Pretty handy if you are using Dropbox in some capacity along with Office 365. I couldn’t see a way to open from say Dropbox and save to OneDrive for Business for example, hopefully we’ll that edition in the not to distant future.

Forcing an update of Office 365 desktop applications

Let’s say that you want to ensure that you have the latest desktop software via Office 365 click to run. In this case I wanted to ensure that I had the Skype for Business update on my desktop.

Of course, you need to have installed your Office desktop application from an Office 365 plan that includes Office desktop software. To update simply open one of these applications.

Select the File tab of the application to view the backstage area as shown above.

From the menu on the left select Account.

On the right hand side you should see a section Office Updates.

Select Update Now from the menu that appears when you select the Update Options button.

If there are new updates to be installed they will now be downloaded. The time taken will depend on how many updates need to be installed.

Any Office applications that are running may need to be shut down to apply updates.

The updates will be applied.

When complete and you run the applications again they should be updated as you can now see I have Skype for Business on the desktop.

So, if you want to manually force your Office Click to Run updates, simply go into an Office application and do so.

Connect SharePoint to MS Access

You can consider SharePoint as an extension of the Office applications you have on your desktop. One of these that provides a huge amount of power but gets used infrequently is Microsoft Access.

Many don’t appreciate that you can easily connect a SharePoint list to Microsoft Access on the desktop. Doing so allows you to use SharePoint as the data repository and Access as the analytical front end, allowing to create complex structures and queries as well as producing mind blowing reports and data analysis quickly and easily.

This tutorial will show you the basic steps of connecting SharePoint to your desktop version of Access. You see how that when you do it establishes an bi-directional link that means data is updated no matter where it is changed.

This is only the beginning of what is possible when you combine Access and SharePoint, however it is a very good place to start. Watch out for more content on this topic very soon.