Microsoft Stack Part 3: Presentations

Microsoft: Presentations

PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is a program which offers users the ability to create presentations to display information. PowerPoint come with a wide range of templates for a number of different kinds of documents which can be used to customise the way in which information is presented on the slides. This allows staff to focus their time on the information and data rather than on formatting.

PowerPoint has been the traditional presentation software in the Microsoft Stack for a number of years, and is considered to be ‘Business Standard’ in many organisations.

Presentations can be created using a wide range of options, utilising media such as images, GIF’s, tables/charts, audio, videos, etc. Different viewing effects are also available, to create a richer display for viewers to gain further information from.

Presenters can keep track of their notes, which are only visible on the device that the presentation is being displayed from; viewers of the presentation cannot see these.

Using Office365 through a browser, presentations can be created, edited, viewed and shared. It’s also possible to have collaboration on a presentation by multiple people in ‘real-time’

PowerPoint can be used in a number of different effective ways to communicate with your audience. Slides are completely customizable to fit your needs. Depending on your approach, you may want to have a presentation that is text-heavy, image-heavy or some combination of both. Text-heavy presentations are generally good if you are giving a lecture to a group within your company and want them to take notes. Image-heavy presentations can help to make your presentation more conversational in style since there only visual cues. Combining the two approaches gives listeners the benefits of both visual aids and notes.

Sway

Although PowerPoint is normally the go-to application for producing presentations, Microsoft has another application which is focused towards enabling users to easily create more engaging presentations, with an emphasis on telling a story rather than presenting a topic.

Sway is a presentation software which enables users to create a range of different documents, such as newsletters, business presentations, portfolios and reports. Although Sway and PowerPoint have many of the same functionalities and capabilities, Sway is Microsoft’s attempt to provide users with a more user-friendly application that focuses on creating content that will engage audiences through telling a story. The emphasis on telling a story rather than creating a presentation means that Sway guides users to create a storyline and narrative, rather than individual, segmented slides of a presentation.

Sway comes with a number of in-built templates to help begin the process of creating presentations, or ‘Sways’. This enables users with non-design backgrounds to easily create Sways that are both visually striking and engaging. If users cannot find a template to start with, they have the option of searching a topic and Sway will produce an outline of a Sway based on this topic for them to use.

It helps gather, format, and share reports, newsletters, web pages, and presentations on an interactive, web-based canvas that that presents well on almost any screen. The collaboration allows you to invite others to be able to edit the story as well in ‘real-time’. It’s also possible to include videos (eg YouTube) and other content from external sources.

Sway is exclusively cloud-based and a free version is available to all users with an Outlook account. An upgraded version is also available in most Office 365 subscriptions for Home and Business.

Presentations can be published to external (public-facing) websites, and include analytics that will show you how many people have viewed it

Microsoft Stack Part 2: Office365

Microsoft: Office 365

Microsoft Office 365 is a software-as-a-service which allows access to a suite of applications through a subscription-based model. Office 365 can be used for both home and business use, and is available on premises and through the cloud (note that some of the extended functionality is only available through desktop applications; access to these will depend on the level of license purchased).

Word

Word is a word processing application which is used to create, edit and format written documents for both home and business use, and it is available in every subscription level across the Office 365 platform. It can also be purchased separately outside of a subscription.

Word has wide applications in the business world as it can be used to create any sort of business document, such as proposals, reports, plans and memos. Templates for these documents can be found in both Word itself as well as online, allowing users to create their documents without having to waste time formatting documents. Also, due to the range of design options available in these templates, users can choose templates which fit the culture of the organisation.

With collaboration, it is possible for multiple people to be viewing and editing a single document at the same time.

Excel

Excel is a widely-used spreadsheet software that allows users to calculate, analyse and visualise data. Like Word, it is part of the core applications suite and is available as part of every subscription package for both home and business use. It can also be purchased separately.

At the most basic level, Excel can be used for entering and storing data. The program, however, has far more capabilities than this, and contains around 500 functions to carry out a vast amount of different tasks, ranging significantly in complexity. The functions available range from simple, everyday functions such as sum, average and count, to more complex and specific functions such as the ACCRINTM function which calculates the interest accrued on a security which only pays interest at maturity. Due the vast capabilities of the program through the functions available, Excel has wide application in the business world and can be a powerful tool for organisations.

Excel also has the ability to use the data within it to create graphs, charts, pivot-tables and other items. This allows for data to be able to be presented visually, enabling people to quickly see an overall picture of the data.

It’s also possible to connect Excel to other data sources (either as a once-off, or with a continual link). This can allow data held elsewhere (e.g. Dynamics365) to be manipulated further within Excel itself. Examples of scenarios for this include comparing and utilising multiple data sources to create an overall dataset.

With collaboration, it is possible for multiple people to be viewing and editing a single spreadsheet at the same time.

PowerPoint

Further information can be found in the documentation for ‘Microsoft Presentations’

OneNote

OneNote is a notebook software which enables users to capture ideas, take notes and create task lists. Notes can be created using text, audio recordings, videos and highlighting and annotating text. Users can organise their notes into pages and sections and notebooks, and can easily share their work with others.

Benefits of OneNote include:

Taking notes & gathering information on any device.
Synced on all devices for anytime access to notes.
Create notebook sections inside books.
Create notebook sections inside notebooks
Create pages & subpages inside sections
Handling mathematical formulae natively

OneNote is also optimised for touchscreen and tablets, allowing users to enter data directly without using a keyboard. Benefits of this include being able to draw diagrams directly into documents, placing flow diagrams easily, etc.

It’s also possible to directly implant other files that can then be referenced, such as saving images from the web, articles from news-sites, and other items.

Access

Access is a database software which allows users to collect, store, sort and manipulate databases. Access and Excel are similar in that they both store data in columns and rows, and can carry out similar tasks, but there are important differences between the two applications and how they are used by organisations. Access is more focused towards for working with databases, and as a result it has a much greater storage capacity than Excel, which is not designed for storing large amounts of data. It is also preferable to use Access to handle large amounts of records, for example, as the manipulation of the data is more productive and it can ensure consistency and accuracy.

When looking at implementing database systems, it could also be useful to consider using Microsoft SQL Server as the database layer for large/complex solutions.

Access is available in the more premium subscriptions for home and office use. Alternatively, it can be purchased separately outside of a subscription.

Publisher

Publisher is a publishing application (only accessible through a desktop application, not as a hosted product) that comes with the more enterprise Office365 licenses, or as a stand-alone application. Publisher differs from Word, which is Microsoft’s flagship word processing application. Word is for writing documents, whether they be long or short with the tools to add page numbering, footnotes, tables of content, indexes, references and annotation. Publishing on the other hand specialises in creating newsletters, brochures, and greeting cards that have graphically rich content and require precise positioning of text and graphics.

Publisher comes with many templates specifically designed for most printed media with pre-positioned placeholders for text and graphics. This makes it easy to choose the layout that best suits the application, for example a newsletter and then start adding text and graphics to suit.

Everything that Publisher does is about creating an aesthetically pleasing layout, formatting and the control that the designer has over objects on a page. Images and even blocks of text are all elements to Publisher and they can be positioned anywhere on the page. Additionally, all these elements are independent of one another. Changes to one element’s position, colour or size doesn’t affect any other element.

Microsoft Stack Part 1: Outlook

Microsoft: Outlook

Outlook is a communication and information management software that allows users to connect and organise their email accounts, address book, calendars and task list. Although Outlook is mainly used for its email functionality, users can also enter appointments and events on the calendar application, add contact information in the address book and create lists of tasks to carry out.

It is possible to be able to connect to different types of email account (Exchange, Office365, POP3, IMAP etc). Different functionalities within Outlook will depend on the account and integration type (eg the Outlook Calendar will not synchronise back to a cloud provider if connecting to it through POP3). However there are various third-party add-ons that can provide and extend the functionality to accounts and devices

Outlook is available for both personal and business use across the Microsoft Office suite in every level of subscription offered. It can be accessed through the Outlook desktop application, or the Outlook web interface

Mail

Mail, the email component of Outlook allows users to send and receive emails, create folders and set filters to sort incoming emails into these folders, send emails at a future date, edit and manage rules for specific events and use conditional formatting.

It’s possible to flag emails visually with different colours, or to mark them as a Task (which will then appear in the Task list).

Using Rules, workflows can be set up to auto-route emails to specific folders based on the sender, subject, etc. This can assist with de-cluttering the general Inbox for users, allowing them to be more efficient. It’s also possible to set up more complicated workflows (eg auto-responders) quite easily

Calendar

The calendar component within Outlook can be used to create, edit and search for appointments and reminders, track RSVPs, manage multiple calendars, share your calendar with specific people and use the scheduling assistant to check whether attendees are free on certain dates.

There is the ability to be able to delegate control of a calendar to other people, with varying degrees of access. This can allow someone else to manage the calendar on behalf of the user, as well as arrange meetings for them.

Appointments can be scheduled with both internal company contacts, as well as external contacts.

Outlook lets users schedule resources like meeting rooms, projectors, etc simply by adding them as a resource to a meeting. The resource then functions just like any attendee, including the ability to auto-respond to the meeting invite as well as the ability to see the free/busy schedule.

People

The contacts part of Outlook, known as People, allows users to create, edit and search for contacts, place contacts into folders, and link contact accounts to Twitter and LinkedIn. Users of People can also import their contacts from friends, followers and connections on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

When using Exchange, the People section of Outlook can be used to import information for other company users and/or contacts from the Exchange Global Address Book.

Tasks

In the task manager component of Outlook, users can create, manage and organise the tasks that need to be undertaken as part of a project. Tasks allows users to create tasks, share and assign them to others, prioritise and categorise them, track tasks by time and monitor their status and progress, amongst other things.

Tag: information

Microsoft Stack Part 3: Presentations

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Microsoft Stack Part 2: Office365

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Microsoft Stack Part 1: Outlook

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