Microsoft Office

Office 365

In addition to -- or instead of -- access to separate Office applications, many institutions are now offering the integrated suite of tools called Microsoft Office 365, which is a cloud-based collaboration service that brings together a range of features:

• The latest Office desktop applications
• Includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Teams, Publisher, Access and more
• Available on mobile devices
• Enables Office content viewing and editing on the go
• Exchange Online Mailbox: access your email, contacts and calendar
• Instant messaging, video and voice calls

This video explains how it works:

Although you may not use all of these features, a few of them will already be familiar and figure daily in your work:

Word 

Word processing was one of the first important benefits of personal computing back in the early 1980s. Suddenly, we could compose right on the screen, freeing us to experiment and be creative in the full knowledge that we could easily change and correct as we work and make a final polished version with little effort. Over the years, Microsoft Word has become the most common word processor in general use, and its file format is a standard for sharing documents:  those created in Word can be accessed using many other packages.   

Excel

Microsoft Excel is spreadsheet software first developed in the 1980s.  Simply put, spreadsheets arrange data in rows and columns of cells and (if necessary) perform calculations. Over the years, Excel has gained capabilities well beyond this and can now be used to manipulate and present data in complicated and sophisticated ways, but it can also be used simply to display information in an organised manner.

Tabulating Information: Some users never need to do anything more complex with Excel than tabulating information in rows and columns, with no real processing at all.  Using a spreadsheet rather than a word-processed table for this kind of thing can have advantages: it's much easier to set up and also allows the stored information to be used in other ways at a later date.  

Number-crunching: If you do the kind of heavy-duty number-crunching that Excel can achieve, you will probably already be using it (or a more powerful tool), perhaps for manipulating large data sets or performing statistical operations.

PowerPoint

It is likely that you've already used Microsoft PowerPoint to deliver lectures and presentations. For all the negative press about "Death by PowerPoint", this is still the most commonly used software for creating visual aids for presentations because it is simple to use, flexible, reliable and available. 

PowerPoint is based around the idea of "slides": a series of pages that you can fill with text, images and embedded videos, and which move one by one through the presentation at the click of a mouse. You can also link out to other content, have the presentation run automatically and create transitions between the slides. 

This article offers tips for using this tool effectively: Tips for Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations.

Sway

There is an alternative to PowePoint in the Microsoft universe: Sway is optimised for web use and for collaboration. You may find it suits your needs better, and is definitely worth investigating. Sway vs. PowerPoint: what's the difference?

Teams/Collaboration and communication

Universities are beginning to explore ways of making use of the various collaboration and communication tools and features within Office 365, such as Teams, either in conjunction with existing online learning environments or possibly as future replacements. Not all of these features will be enabled in your specific institution, but it would be worth learning about them.

If you aren't that confident using Office applications (and other commonly used software), you may find the video tutorials from Tech for Teachers and Students informative.

Your own institution will also have a range of training courses. [Add links to IT support and training]