March 15, 2021
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Your Duke Office 365 account provides you with some effective tools to help with your productivity and collaboration. Here’s a quick look at the latest set of tools available with your Duke account –
But first, here’s our Tech Tip of the Week …
Where do you store your home WiFi password? Or information related to an online membership? Or any number of sticky notes that you want to save and keep private?
Use LastPass – it’s not just for passwords. It provides ultimate security for your private sticky notes! You can use LastPass as your own digital vault to store private notes, files and other non-password items. When you login to LastPass, select Secure Notes, then press Add Note. Only you will have access to this text file. You can even attach files (spreadsheets, PDFs, etc.) to these notes.
Want a secure place to store your bookmarks? Login to LastPass, then select Sites and press Add Site. This is useful for websites you access frequently that require UserID/Passwords, such as banks. It’s safer than storing them in your browsers.
Remember, LastPass is the single best tool you can use to protect your online activity.
What is Office 365, anyway?
MS Office 365 is an online productivity suite that can help you collaborate with your colleagues, as well as manage your email, scheduling, storage, tasks and contacts. Here are some of the more popular features:
- Office 365 Exchange Online – Office 365 offers you a great online tool for managing your email and calendaring. Office 365 email is optimized for mobile devices. It allows you to set your preferences in one place and have the same experience on all of your devices that use the online version of Office 365.
- MS Office Online – Just like Google Docs, only better … and more secure. You can share and co-edit documents easily using the online versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This is ideal for group work. See updates in real-time from any of your colleagues that share access to individual files. This is especially powerful during a videoconferencing session.
- MS OneNote – This is a great tool to help you organize your notes or collect your thoughts for that big project. Or plan your next vacation.
- MS OneDrive – Unlimited, secure cloud-based storage for your academic, professional and personal files that can be shared with anyone who has a Duke NetID.
Collaboration Tools
Don’t forget that your Duke Office365 account has some great collaboration tools you can use to organize your team or DUSON operational group. Try these out:
- MS Teams – Office365 offers teams a way to have a customizable chat-based team workspace.
- Staff Notebook – Collaborate with faculty and staff to share notes, policies, procedures, deadlines and calendars.
- Planner – Create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get progress updates with Planner.
- Forms – Create surveys,quizzes, and polls quickly and easily. Send them to anyone and review results in real-time. (Note: MS Forms is not approved for sensitive data.)
How do I use these tools?
On a workstation, open your preferred browser and navigate to mail.duke.edu. After you login with your NetID and password, you will open to the main email window. In the left-hand corner to the left of the text “Office 365”, you should see a waffle graphic. Press this for a menu of all your options that include the tools listed above.
Want to use MS Office Online from your Android or iOS device? Click here to learn how to install MS Office on your mobile device using Duke’s Mobile Device Manager.
Extra Credit …
Microsoft provides extensive help in using each of these tools. When you open the main Office 365 application, click on the “?” to get assistance with all of these applications. Just enter a few keywords to provide some context for the type of help you need.
Not finding what you need online? Try LinkedIn Learning – you’ll likely find the help you need.
Missing Our Campus?
Our Duke Photo of the Week is the entrance to Duke’s East Campus. It’s an easy 5-minute bus ride from the Abele Quad, or a pleasant long walk from DUSON.
