It’s Time to Upgrade Our Microsoft Office Knowledge

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No excuses.

SharePoint, Power Automate, Forms, and yes, Excel. You heard it here first.

If “I’m not good at computers” is something you say, no worries. It’s Office, so it’s designed with you in mind! You got this.

If “I’m a dev, so Office is easy for me” is something you think, you’re probably right. You should also definitely spend a little time to understand these tools.

In this post, I’m just listing the Office tools/features that I think are essential knowledge for most people with computer centric jobs; everyone from a software developer to an accountant to an HR manager. I’ll link to some good resources to dig into each thing, and you should absolutely dive into one. Once you do, you’ll see what I mean, and then you’ll do the next one.

SharePoint

SharePoint is not another OneDrive. It’s much more powerful and has distinct use cases.

SharePoint’s power lies in three products:

  • Lists
  • Document Libraries
  • Pages

Get Going:

  1. How to Use Lists in Microsoft SharePoint Online – Office 365
  2. What are SharePoint lists and libraries?
  3. How to use Microsoft SharePoint

Power Automate

Power Automate is the glue that binds the rest of MS Office together. It can get rid of the mind numbing work of copy/paste archiving, communication on status updates, etc. It’s no-code, and it’s accessible.

Get Going:

  1. Microsoft Power Automate for Beginners: Start Automating Today!
  2. I wrote a detailed post with my thoughts and experience on Power Automate: here.

Forms

Forms can standardize information capture. It’s like Google Forms, but in Office. It has required fields, conditional question flow, and only the information you need. You can’t get “standard” or “required” in an email.

Get Going: How to Use Microsoft Forms at Work

Excel

EVERYONE that uses Excel should know VLOOKUP and Pivot tables.

Many people should make the effort to understand macros and how to use the Macro Recorder feature in Excel that writes the VBA code to replicate your clicks.

Get Going:

  1. How to use VLOOKUP in Microsoft Excel
  2. How to Create Pivot Table in Excel
  3. How to Create Macros in Excel Tutorial

Happy building, analyzing, and automating ✌️

P.S. SharePoint for Process Improvement and Automation

I’ve seen SharePoint get thrown into the “another OneDrive” bucket all too often. And while SharePoint does have an option to create document libraries, which are just folders with files, it also has three other unique features that are extremely useful.

First, SharePoint has “lists” that are essentially tables with a lot of nice features such as easy filtering, data entry via forms, and color coded labelling. People should use SharePoint lists more and Excel files less when tracking deliverables, due dates, and other project management type of data.

Second, SharePoint has an ability to make simple SharePoint sites that are very useful for organizing biz info. For example, you can have a landing page with links to “document libraries” (files), SharePoint lists, PowerBI dashboards, etc. Again, no code!

Finally, PowerBI can be linked directly to a SharePoint list, so visualizing that data becomes very straightforward. This is not a silver bullet, but it does fit a common biz function and allows users to develop their own no-code solutions.