Book Image

Efficiency Best Practices for Microsoft 365

By : Dr. Nitin Paranjape
Book Image

Efficiency Best Practices for Microsoft 365

By: Dr. Nitin Paranjape

Overview of this book

Efficiency Best Practices for Microsoft 365 covers the entire range of over 25 desktop and mobile applications on the Microsoft 365 platform. This book will provide simple, immediately usable, and authoritative guidance to help you save at least 20 minutes every day, advance in your career, and achieve business growth. You'll start by covering components and tasks such as creating and storing files and then move on to data management and data analysis. As you progress through the chapters, you'll learn how to manage, monitor, and execute your tasks efficiently, focusing on creating a master task list, linking notes to meetings, and more. The book also guides you through handling projects involving many people and external contractors/agencies; you'll explore effective email communication, meeting management, and open collaboration across the organization. You'll also learn how to automate different repetitive tasks quickly and easily, even if you’re not a programmer, transforming the way you import, clean, and analyze data. By the end of this Microsoft 365 book, you'll have gained the skills you need to improve efficiency with the help of expert tips and techniques for using M365 apps.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Efficient Content Creation
7
Section 2: Efficient Collaboration
10
Section 3: Integration

Understanding macros

Macros are a popular form of automation with Microsoft Office—especially Excel. We seem to think that whenever there is any repetitive action, we should create a macro. That is incorrect. Repetitive actions usually mean that you are using an inefficient method/process/feature set.

Here is the recommended approach:

  1. Consider the repetitive activity.
  2. Find if there is a better way within the app itself.
  3. If you find a better way, check if that better method is repetitive.

a. If still repetitive, then write a macro (or try to automate it)

b. If not repetitive, problem solved

We saw many examples of this in Chapter 4, Intelligent Data Analysis, while learning about Power Query.

Macros are best suited for scenarios where you have a need but there is no feature in the app to satisfy that need. Adding missing but useful functionality using macros is out of the scope of this book. However, here are some macros that I have created...