Last week we asked you to tell us whether you prefer Google Drive or Office 365 for collaboration with colleagues. On the back of a 92 per cent vote for Google Drive, we asked IT if they could help us better navigate Office 365.
Collaborating more efficiently
Macquarie’s Learning and Innovation Hub and Office 365 Support team recently joined forces to give more insight into Office 365 and demonstrate how we can use it to collaborate better. We want to assure staff that you can continue to use Google Drive and there are no plans to retire Google Apps.
What should I use to collaborate?
Staff have the choice to use either Google Drive or OneDrive (Office 365), to collaborate with staff or students. Students have been given access to the Microsoft Office suite (excluding mail and calendaring, which remains in Gmail), enabling continued collaboration between staff and students on either platform.
Find out more in the recent Teche story: Collaboration in Office 365… and busting a big myth about Google Drive!
Gmail vs Outlook
Outlook has similar functionality to Gmail, so the functions in Gmail that you are familiar with are – for the most part – available, but managed differently. The IT team have put together a handy comparison table to help you better navigate Outlook functionality.
Tips and resources
Tips for online collaboration using Google and Office 365 are available online, in addition to the University’s user guides for staff. If that’s too many clicks away, a simple browser search for the action you need to complete (eg. ‘how do I share a folder on 365?’) usually brings up easy to follow steps.
We will be offering more Office 365 hints and tips in future, so stay tuned to This Week and Teche. You can also let us know if there is anything you would like us to cover.
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So funny. So 92% say they want Google. Office 365 is hard to use. You respond by trying to teach us how to use it. This is the problem. These articles are click bait, and staff are not listened. IT, give us back our Gmail, and keep Google Drive.
Great, maybe next the Learning and Support Team and Office 365 Support Team can also team up to tell us why we made this change in the first place, when the opinion of the faculty and staff seem to have been manifestly against it. This change was forced on us without any consultation or consideration given to our needs, and the most significant change it has made to my workflow is that I simply don’t use my MQ email any more. Great job, keep up the good work.
I agree with all the comments re searching in Outlook, and echo exactly what Christina has said. GMail is much more intuitive. Outlook can’t even recognise the email address of people who’ve written to me on the same day.
I completely agree with everyone on the search issues with Outlook. Google was a lot better. Google labels and views were great to keep emails organised and it worked wonderfully when linked to Todoist app. I could see my To-Do lists right next to my emails and could link emails to tasks/lists. With outlook it doesn’t work properly. My main frustration is the calendar. You can’t easily see people’s availability and it is very annoying not to be able to see acceptances when others have organised a meeting. I am using the desktop version of outlook which has more functionalities, but I still miss Gmail and the quick chat window.
In Gmail, I can quickly assign messages to folders. Simply open the message, type “l”, type the start of the folder name, “enter”, and done. Device: Keyboard. Time spent: 3 seconds.
In 356, I seem to have to drag messages to folders. Device: Mouse. Time spent: up to 15 seconds (because I have many subfolders: teaching multiple units, managing multiple projects).
Is this minor? I navigate my whole computer without a mouse because of repetitive strain injury. And with our many e-mails a day, a 5-fold increase in the time needed to file messages is very significant.
I have become less consistent in labeling messages. Combined with 365’s poor search performance (see other messages), I end up wasting time compared to when we still had Gmail.
Searching for emails is so limited on 365. Why can’t I search for a word, phrase or name? Even when I search for a person’s email address I get results without that address. Many of us resort to going back to gmail to look for emails from last year and beyond where we can filter the search.
I need to write to students in my job and not having them on the search directory is really frustrating. I also used the chat function to get a quick answer from other administrators in other offices, I could see if they were online on my email page. Loosing the calendar ability to book internal rooms in our department has been another frustration. IT have tried to help us sort out a new way but so far we have to use 365 groups and this has not been very successful. Overall after using 365 for 6 months I find it an inferior product to Gmail.
Is there a way to download multiple files on Office 365 OneDrive at the same time from the Browser?
Not liking Office365 much. I have gmail as my personal email and wouldn’t choose Office365 for it at all. ‘Nuff said. But I suppose we have to get used to it. Finding old emails is challenging, and I often have to refer back to an older email. Now I know to un-thread them and choose Messages instead of Conversations has made this searching easier. Still wouldn’t want it for my personal email though.
But sharing calendars using the Outlook Mac client is functionally disabled by design. Makes collaboration very difficult.
I’d like to see Google Apps come back.