Dear Faculty, We would like to share some updates we made to our classroom technology this spring and summer.   Classroom AV: All our classrooms have a built-in computer with updated software and an AV projection system. This spring and summer we upgraded the AV systems in Stokes 119, 206, and 301, Hall 6, 106, and 112, the Observatory classroom, and Chase 101.  These classrooms now have high definition computer projectors, digital HDMI connections for your laptop, tablet or portable device, Blu-ray DVD players, and new AV control panels. Please check our updated classroom technology page on the IITS website for more details and operation instructions.   HDMI: Most of our rooms now have HDMI ports to connect your laptop, tablet, or mobile device to the projector with an HDMI cable.  For those of you still using the old VGA computer cables, you may find that HDMI gives you higher resolution and a clearer image. We can’t leave loose HDMI cables in the classrooms (they disappear) but we can provide you with your own HDMI cable.  Please email avreq@haverford.edu to ask us for an HDMI cable (and the appropriate HDMI adapter dongle, if required, for your device.) For a list of all the rooms with HDMI capability please check our classroom technology page.   Fewer VHS players in classrooms: As we update the AV projection systems in our classrooms, we are no longer able to install VHS videotape players.  As a result, only 10 of our classrooms still have the capability to play and project VHS videotapes.  If you have VHS tapes you need to play in your class, it’s time to upgrade to either a DVD or digital copy of the video. Please contact your library bibliographer or Norm Medeiros. The library will either try to purchase a DVD or streaming copy for you.   AV Staff: Please welcome our new AV Support Specialist Robert Lukasik. Bob started in late May and works with Roger in the AV office in Stokes 025.  He can be reached at rlukasik@haverford.edu or at 610-896-1193.  You can reach us at the shared email address: avreq@haverford.edu.   Please feel free to contact us should you have any question or concerns. Thank you, Roger Hill, Director of AV Services Bob Lukasik, AV Specialist

When we developed OneNoteforTeachers.com exclusively for educators, we didn’t know that OneNote would take off the way it has in education. Since launching the site in October 2014, we have seen interest from educators for getting "Ninja" trained on OneNote with the wealth of interactive guides on the site. Now, they are telling their principals and students about their new skills in OneNote sparking their interest in OneNote in education. To meet this need, we redesigned the site to include guides and pages for both students and administrators and gave it a more fitting name of OneNoteInEducation.com. New guides for anyone in your school or district The original OneNoteforTeachers.com website was on one page and served its purpose for teachers. However, with the momentum the OneNote Class Notebook—teachers inviting students into their notebooks and the release of OneNote Staff Notebook for Education—it was clear that students and administrators need some space and resources to themselves (since no one likes a jealous kid or a grumpy principal). The new multi-tabbed site gives everyone what they want—with OneNoteForTeachers.com still directing to the Teacher tab of the site. The interactive guides can be played and shared from any device. We hope you will share this great resource with everyone at your school or district who might benefit from some new world PD (professional development) on staying organized and efficient. Since these guides are like OneNote—free and bite-sized (5-7 minutes in length)—even an hour going through these will get you through them and on your way to new heights. All for one, OneNote for all! The post New OneNoteInEducation.com—designed for everyone in a school appeared first on Office Blogs.

Buckman is a specialty chemical company based in Memphis, TN, which produces chemistries for water treatment and for the paper and leather industries. With people, factories and customers all over the world, Buckman communicates across geographies, teams and time zones all the time. It recently swapped a complex multi-vendor communications and collaboration toolset for Microsoft Office 365. The result has been smoother, more effective collaboration among the company’s 1,700 associates, higher reliability, lower costs and tighter control over email and data. We recently sat down with Tim Meek, vice president of Global Information Technology at Buckman, and Paul Grassel, director of Global IT Computer Services, to learn more about why Buckman switched to Office 365. Q: Give us a brief history of your communications and collaboration landscape. Meek: Microsoft Outlook has been our standard for a long time. Even as our email systems evolved, Outlook has been the constant. Q: Why Outlook? Grassel: Because our associates have always used the entire Office suite, and Outlook is part of that. They rely heavily on Outlook and consider it the go-to "workhorse" application that they use on a daily basis. In 2011, however, we adopted popular cloud-based products for email and file-sharing. We liked the idea of not having to maintain email servers and software around the world. We had also been using PlumTree Portal since 2005 for collaboration and several document management systems. Q: Sounds like things were getting complicated. Meek: They were. We ended up with a complex, multi-vendor environment that was expensive and difficult to support and maintain. Q: Was there a point at which cracks began to appear? Meek: After providing great integration with Outlook for several years, our cloud vendor seemed to back off its Outlook support. We were experiencing problems with their Outlook syncing tool; calendar syncing became unreliable. We didn’t feel we were receiving full support from them for new versions of Outlook. Grassel: Plus, there were other problems. We were experiencing email delivery delays of several days in China, which cost us business. That drove some of our people in China to use alternative communication systems—not good for security and compliance. Q: So there were some trust issues? Meek: Yes. Also, around then, it was time to upgrade or replace PlumTree. With the collaboration capabilities included in Office 365, we saw an opportunity to reduce complexity and consolidate vendors. Simplicity, speed and reliability are our IT themes at Buckman, and Microsoft is one of our primary vendors. Grassel: We also saw a constant flow of new capabilities in Office 365, and capabilities that made sense. The acquisition of Yammer is one example; Yammer integrates well with the other Office 365 tools. Meek: Our previous cloud products were easy to use but designed with more of a consumer mindset. Microsoft products are full-featured and getting easier to use all the time, especially the Office 365 mobile apps. We felt that Office 365 had the reliability, transparency and control required for our global organization. Q: Give me a sense of how Office 365 has changed the way people work at Buckman. Meek: Office 365 has given us a platform to better perform as teams. We have people working across geographies in every area of the company (sales, manufacturing, R&D, customer service), and with Office 365, they can collaborate more easily. Meek: I get on Office 365 a couple times a day to lead our global IT workgroup. We’re sharing documents, booking dates in our shared calendar and using Lync Online presence to quickly see if team members are available for a chat or phone conversation. Our CEO uses Lync to discuss progress on strategic initiatives with Buckman global leadership located around the world. He’s a big advocate for its use to improve Buckman’s ability to connect and collaborate. Grassel: PlumTree was so complex that it required IT to manage sites and content for business areas. But associates are able to manage sites and information in Office 365 on their own. Q: Has it made your jobs easier? Grassel: For sure. We no longer have to keep up with licenses purchased through different channels or keep up with media for each version of Office, much less who is licensed for each. Major transitions to new versions of Office are a thing of the past with Office 365 Click-to-Run. Grassel: I can manage Office 365 licenses from one master console and lock down individual mailboxes and files if someone leaves the company. This really helps with security and compliance. Q: What kind of savings have you seen? Meek: We’ve been able to pull the plug on PlumTree and the document management systems. We save on servers, licensing and support. We have achieved a greater level of simplicy, speed and reliability with the integrated platform of Office 365 that keeps all of our associates’ software up-to-date with a consistent set of productivity tools. Q: Sounds like a win all the way around. Meek: It has been. A big win for Buckman, its associates and its customers. For the full story read the Buckman case study. The post Buckman finds the right communications chemistry by switching to Office 365 appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today, we are pleased to announce the general availability of Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online from Australian datacenters. In addition, Microsoft Office 365 has just completed a formal security assessment for Unclassified Sensitive government data via Australian Government’s Independent Registered Assessors Program (IRAP). These announcements will help ensure that customer data will be protected, easily managed and compliant—all from trusted foundations in private clouds, hybrid clouds and public clouds. Microsoft Office 365 is the first cloud productivity service to provide IRAP assurance in Australia, with  Dynamics CRM Online currently under a similar IRAP assessment. Our comprehensive approach to global and local certifications provides the gold standard in security to federal government agencies, state government, education, healthcare, and commercial enterprises in Australia—all verified by third parties. These new local services will provide even faster performance, offer geo-redundant back-up and help customers address data residency considerations. We’re thrilled to be able to provide these technologies locally to help Australian businesses and organizations innovate and compete globally. To hear from some of our customers and learn more about Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online in Australia, take a look at our local announcement. The post Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online now available from datacenters in Australia appeared first on Office Blogs.

With April’s Office update, Lync will become Skype for Business, with a new user interface (UI) in the Windows desktop application. On today’s show, we take a look the new Skype for Business desktop application for Windows. BJ Haberkorn joins Jeremy Chapman to demonstrate what’s new and explain what’s coming. With April’s update from Lync to Skype for Business around the corner, Jeremy also demonstrates how you can control what your users will see. On March 16th we announced how you can get ready for Skype for Business and get started with the Skype for Business technical preview. The updated experience will be familiar to both Lync and Skype users, with notable requested updates to improve discoverability of the dial pad, easier access to controls and device selection interfaces. The new Skype for Business also integrates people search with the entire Skype network. Skype for Business will roll out as an update to Lync on April 14th as part of Office monthly updates. If you are using Lync Online today with Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business Premium or Office 2013, the updated Skype for Business client—inspired by the look and feel of Skype—will be the default user experience and replace the Lync user experience.  If you are using Lync Server today, the Lync UI will be the default experience. The good news is that regardless of whether you are using Lync Online or Lync Server, you have the ability to control when the updated experience is rolled out to your users. There are two ways to do this. First, Office 365 ProPlus and Office 2013 allow you to control when monthly updates are delivered to your users. Second, both the online service and the server now have policy settings to control the user experience using PowerShell. While the settings are slightly different for online and server customers, both are straightforward, and allow you to manage the UI centrally. Controlling the UI in Lync Online and Skype for Business Online We demonstrate how this is performed for the online service on the show; once you’re logged into the online service via PowerShell, you can use Grant-CsClientPolicy Cmdlet as shown below, to control the experience: Disable Skype user interface (UI) for all users: Grant-CsClientPolicy -PolicyName ClientPolicyDisableSkypeUI Enable Skype UI for all users: Grant-CsClientPolicy -PolicyName ClientPolicyEnableSkypeUI These Cmdlets will control the UI presented to all users in your Office 365 or Lync Online tenant. There are more options for controlling the experience at an individual user or group level on TechNet. Controlling the UI in Lync Server and Skype for Business Server If you’re running Lync Server and want to roll out the updated Skype for Business UI to your organization, you can use the Set-CsClientPolicy Cmdlet: Enable Skype UI for all users: Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity Global -EnableSkypeUI $true Disable Skype user interface (UI) for all users: Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity Global -EnableSkypeUI $false In addition to the options above for selecting between the Skype for Business UI and the Lync UI, we’ve created a number of resources to help with awareness, readiness and adoption.  These resources, along with the ability to switch the UI between the two interfaces, will give users the resources they need to be prepared for this change. What’s next? In the show we also discuss changes coming to the online experience for users and administrators, upcoming Skype for Business Servers, planned support for enterprise voice and calling in Office 365, new hardware from Polycom and Surface Hub, plus updates coming from Azure ExpressRoute to enhance Skype for Business even further. Watch the show to see Skype for Business in action and hear all the news about what’s coming for administrators. The post What’s new in Skype for Business and how you can take control of updates appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post about Office 365 was written by Lise Fournel, senior vice president and chief information officer for Air Canada.  Air Canada has been voted Best Carrier in North America for five straight years in the Skytrax World Airline Awards, and we’re now focused on aggressive international expansion with our new 787 aircraft. The smart use of technology will be instrumental in achieving our goals. We have spent billions of dollars modernizing our fleet, upgrading airport lounges and enhancing the customer experience. This includes offering the latest digital services for customers, such as mobile travel apps, online reservations and check-in, and flight status verification. We also needed to give our 27,000 employees the latest technology tools if we wanted to create a new culture of employee collaboration. Many of our employees, including pilots, flight attendants and ground crew, don’t sit at desks in front of PCs but work throughout the world on a 24/7 basis, so we needed non-traditional ways to deliver IT services. We decided to go to the cloud—specifically Microsoft Office 365—because it provides an accessible and scalable collaborative platform across multiple device platforms. By using Office 365, our employees stay connected to the company and to one another all of the time. We use Office 365 to support our employee portal called ACaeronet, which presents information to employees customized to their job roles; for example, pilots see different information than mechanics or flight attendants. It gives them access to the powerful search capability of SharePoint Online (part of Office 365), which enables them to quickly find the information they need. ACaeronet is a key source of information for Air Canada employees. It provides access to more than 100 tools, applications and data repositories that our folks access with simple search commands. It includes access to online reference guides that contain vital operational information related to Air Canada’s products, policies, and procedures so employees can readily find up-to-date answers for themselves and to assist customers. It simplifies administrative functions, such as filling out timesheets or obtaining forms, and it also contains a comprehensive directory and organizational charts to make it easy to locate colleagues for needed assistance. Moreover, it serves as a channel to the latest company news and employee publications. ACaeronet also gives our teams access to Yammer, the social networking service available with Office 365. Our flight attendants, maintenance crews, pilots and other mobile employees jump on Yammer from ACaeronet using their smartphones to make comments, ask questions, share ideas and problem-solve. For example, cabin crew members post notes to colleagues with tips to expedite boarding or handle unusual situations. Many use it to offer kudos to fellow employees or share their excitement about new aircraft. They even post pictures. And because our employees are a community of like-minded travelers, they also share travel tips, hotel recommendations and even restaurant suggestions for cities all over the world. Yammer has turned into a great forum for management and employee dialog. Keeping these lines of communication open is critical, because our workforce is dispersed around the world. Ours is also a complex business, and employees often need quick answers to questions about policies and procedures. The Millennial Generation coming into our workforce is fluent in social and mobile communications tools. They use them in their personal lives, and they expect them at work. Our Cargo Team is experimenting with Office 365 conferencing and texting tools to determine which aircraft have cargo room. This helps us fly all our planes at greater capacity for maximum profitability. With these versatile tools at their fingertips and available from smartphones, tablets or PCs, our employees can find the information they need, wherever they are, to solve problems and help ensure a smooth, efficient operation. We’re also saving money by moving to the cloud. We get a steady stream of new capabilities for a reasonable monthly subscription with no expensive upgrades. As an example, the OneDrive for Business service in Office 365 has advanced tremendously in one year. Employees each get 1 terabyte of personal storage space in the cloud. It’s the same with email; our employees went from 50-megabyte mailboxes to 50-gigabyte mailboxes—1,000 times larger. Our own IT staff would be hard-pressed to roll out these kinds of service improvements at the pace that Microsoft does. Relieved of maintaining and upgrading a massive communications infrastructure, IT now has more time to develop new services that help us compete even more effectively. —Lise Fournel The post Air Canada employees use the cloud to learn, share, develop ideas and collaborate appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’ve just opened the Call for Content for community-presented sessions at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago, IL, May 4-8 2015. These sessions are a great opportunity to share your hard-won expertise and best practices with other attendees at the event. The 20-minute sessions will be delivered by community members to attendees in the Lounge theaters located in the Expo Hall during lunchtime Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, May 5-7 2015. To submit a session proposal, go to the Call for Content (RSVP code = Ign!t3) and provide: Twitter handle Blog URL Title and abstract (Note: No third-party pitches) List program membership if any: MVP, RD, MCT, user group lead Note, you must be a registered attendee to speak at or attend a session For these community sessions, we will supply the following logistical support: Theater for 25+ people in the Expo Hall Lounge MC and tech support Podium with AV outlet and three microphones Submission timeline: April 1, 2015—Session submissions open April 7, 2015—Session submissions closed April 14, 2015—Selected sessions announced The post Take the stage at Microsoft Ignite! appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post was written by Allen Filush, product manager on the Outlook team. Since the launch of Outlook for iOS and Android in January, we’ve been hard at work rolling out updates every few weeks. Today, we are happy to share more details about recent improvements to our People and Calendar experiences, plus a bit more information on what’s next. Revised People section Outlook’s People section now is a complete address book. We’ve replaced our previous, lightweight "top contacts" view with a unified view or your contacts from all your email accounts. Selecting a contact lets you view their contact information, launch a new email, start a phone call or map your way to their location with a single click. But we didn’t stop there. Outlook also provides quick-clicks to easily find all the emails, meetings and files shared with the contact. People is now an alphabetical contact list. Selecting a contact lets you view the contact’s information as well as recent emails, meetings and files you’ve worked on together. The unique controls provided by Android allow us to take this a step farther. Outlook for Android pulls in the contacts stored locally on the phone to create a unified address book for all your contacts, even if they are not stored in one of your email accounts. Contact details in Outlook for Android. Directory search Sometimes you need contact details for someone in your company or school who’s not saved as a contact. Outlook now integrates your full organizational directory (also known as the Global Address List or GAL) in the People section. Just type in the name of the person you’re looking for in the search bar and then select Search Directory. We’ve also integrated this same capability into the email compose experience so email within your organization is easier than ever. Directory search is now available in the People section and in the email compose experience. The directory search feature works for customers using commercial Office 365 or Exchange Server email. In addition to contacts, you can also search for other items in your directory, including conference rooms, distribution lists and Groups. Three-day view in Calendar The Calendar section now provides a Three-day view when in landscape. This complements the existing Agenda and Day views to show more of your calendar at once. This is especially useful on larger devices like the iPhone 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. New Three-day landscape calendar view. We’ve also delivered other improvements in the Calendar, including support for zero-length meetings, a ‘remove from calendar’ action for cancelled meetings and an improved calendar day picker when creating and editing meetings. Search highlighting We’re all struggling with email overload. Inboxes of a thousand or more messages can often bury important emails we need to find quickly. To help make searching on your mobile device more effective, we now highlight your search term in the message list, creating a quick visual cue for finding that key email. We also show you the number of results so that you can decide if you need to refine your query for a more targeted search. Search results now highlight your search term. This feature is currently available on iOS and will be coming in an update to Outlook for Android soon. Fit and finish Our recent updates have also tackled several other key areas in direct response to your feedback: Select all—You can now "select all" to perform bulk operations on messages in a folder (available on iOS, coming soon to Android). Undo of bulk actions—Undo now works on bulk operations like delete and archive. Empty trash/deleted items folders—You can now permanently delete items from your deleted items folder. Localization—Improvements to localization across our 30 languages. Accessibility—Improvements on the message list and compose screen. Permanently delete messages from the Trash folder. Looking ahead Over the coming weeks and months, we will continue to deliver user-focused features to help you get even more done on the go, as well additional security and management features that matter to IT. On the top of our list is mobile device management support. This is a must-have capability at many businesses today and we are making quick progress on this work. We are committed to delivering support for the new built-in MDM features for Office 365 and for Microsoft Intune later this quarter. Also high on the Outlook priority list is enabling the ability to read and reply to Information Rights Management (IRM) protected email and delivering OAuth support for Office 365 and Yahoo! accounts. Today, we already support OAuth for Outlook.com, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and Gmail. Have a feature request? Let us know right from Outlook by navigating to Settings > Help > Contact Support. Your feedback is how we prioritize new features and updates. Thanks for using Outlook! —Allen Filush The post More updates for Outlook for iOS and Android appeared first on Office Blogs.

With 34.5 million workers employed worldwide by U.S. multinational companies, today’s workplace is truly borderless. Organizations are competing for top talent on a global scale and employees need to collaborate effectively across multiple cultures, languages and time zones. Register now to watch Modern Workplace live on April 7th, and hear directly from two global leadership experts about how to span geographical and cultural boundaries to create a culture of collaboration that makes your business more efficient and agile—no matter where employees are located. We’ll also look at how Office 365 tools can be used to bring teams together, drive innovation and improve efficiency across the global enterprise. Globalization of the workforce April 7th | 8:00 a.m. PDT / 3:00 p.m. GMT Special guests Kathleen Matthews—Executive vice president and chief Global Communications and Public Affairs officer for Marriott International, will outline the processes and technologies her organization uses to create a thriving global businesses with 4,000 properties in more than 70 countries. Maya Hu-Chan—Global leadership expert, international management consultant, and co-author of the book Global Leadership: The Next Generation, will explain what steps organizations can take to bridge the leadership and management challenges that stem from multi-national operations. Tune in to the live broadcast for a chance to ask questions of studio guests and Microsoft Office 365 product managers both during and after the show. For more information, visit www.modernworkplace.com. Register today! The post Next on Modern Workplace—globalization of the workforce appeared first on Office Blogs.

Just over a year ago, we introduced Office Lens for Windows Phone—and over that time the app has become one of the most popular free apps on Windows Phone, with an average rating of 4.6 stars (out of 5) from more than 18,500 reviews. Today, we’re releasing Office Lens for iPhone and Android phones. Office Lens is a handy capture app that turns your smartphone into a pocket scanner and it works with OneNote so you’ll never lose a thing. Use it to take pictures of receipts, business cards, menus, whiteboards or sticky notes—then let Office Lens crop, enhance and save to OneNote. Just like that—all the scanned images you capture from Office Lens are accessible on all your devices. Office Lens for iPhone is available for free at the Apple App Store. Here’s a quick look at some of the more significant features and capabilities that Office Lens for iPhone supports: Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image. Before-and-after look at pictures of a receipt and a paper document captured and processed by Office Lens for iPhone. Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by key word for the image in OneNote or OneDrive. Converts images of paper documents and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files for easy editing and reformatting (see more details here). Captures business cards and generates contacts you can add to your phone. Inserts images to OneNote or OneDrive (as DOCX, PPTX, JPG or PDF format) and gives you options to save, export and share the image. Before-and-after look at a picture of a whiteboard, captured and processed by Office Lens for iPhone, as well as the options you have to save, export or share with others. Additionally, a preview of Office Lens for Android phones is available today, with features similar to Office Lens for iPhone. To get the Office Lens for Android phone, follow these three easy steps: Go to Office Lens Android Preview in the Google+ community. Click Join community in the upper right-hand corner. Under About this community, click the Become a Tester link and then follow instructions on the page. Bringing Office Lens to iPhone and Android is a significant step for extending OneNote capture capabilities to more devices and endpoints. Get it for your iPhone, Android phone or Windows Phone today—start scanning documents and whiteboards from the convenience of your phone, and let us know what you think in the comments below and at app store feedback. The post Office Lens comes to iPhone and Android appeared first on Office Blogs.

Imagine an analyst who can quickly analyze and present data to help you see if you are meeting your business objectives such as increase profits, reduce costs or decrease patient length of stay. The analyst then repeatedly queries your data to select the best ten or so graphs that you should see based on your business objective. Your analyst conducts multiple statistical tests to rule out graphs that could mislead you because the visual pattern is driven by outliers. Finally the output is a Word or PowerPoint report that walks you through each graph and explains how to accurately interpret each. And your analyst can do all this work in seconds; all you need is to know how to use Microsoft Office. Sounds like a fantasy? Well the Excel team is helping BeyondCore, a recognized leader in Smart Pattern Discovery, to bring this to reality right inside of Excel and the rest of the Office apps. The U.S. faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings, according to the McKinsey Global Institute in "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity." At the same time, a need for analytics pervades modern business, as organizations move from gut-driven to data-driven business processes. BeyondCore delivers technology that extends the powerful analytics features of Excel and the familiar storytelling environments of Word and PowerPoint to help bridge this gap for business users. The BeyondCore App for Excel will extend Excel’s capabilities by helping users discover the right questions to ask of their data and how to interpret insights accurately. The app, being integrated into the Excel desktop experience, will automatically evaluate data in an Excel workbook and provide curated graphs and narrative explanations that point out the statistically significant insights of the data. These insights can be exported to a PowerPoint presentation or Word document, making it ready to share and present. You can further customize reports using the BeyondCore App for Word and App for PowerPoint. Once the app is made available to the public, organizations can give their employees access via the Apps for Office store or directly within Excel, Word or PowerPoint.  This solution works with Office 2013 and will be coming soon to other Office versions. BeyondCore’s technology is based on eight years of research. Twenty-one of the Fortune 100 already use the product, and Gartner Research recently highlighted BeyondCore in its Smart Pattern Discovery category. The company was also called a disruptive technology in Harvard Business Review by Clay Christensen and in The Economist. BeyondCore Apps for Office is available now. To sign up, visit www.beyondcore.com/invitation. The post BeyondCore’s new apps for Office helps find insights in your data automatically appeared first on Office Blogs.

The OneNote team can proudly say that the power of the collective has resonated throughout the country. Shortly after our first event that honored University of Central Florida engineering student Albert Manero, The Collective Project and Robert Downey Jr. collaborated to surprise Alex—a child in need of a bionic arm—with his own Iron Man arm. We were all blown away by the power that story had as it circulated the Internet immediately after Robert Downey Jr. released the video on March 12th. The touching video brought tears to viewers everywhere, and thanks to the generous people involved, we all discovered the stunning impact that one action has when people selflessly come together to create something for the greater good.   After making a huge splash, it was time to give a new group of students the opportunity to make an impact in the lives of others. The OneNote Collective Project team landed on the Penn State campus on March 16th to rally students around inspiring student Neha Gupta and her cause—Empower Orphans. Recent winner of the International Children’s Peace Prize, Neha started her charity at the age of nine with a simple, local garage sale.  She has since helped over 25,000 orphans around the world through her fundraising efforts. She is a powerful example of how one person can make a big difference. She believes strongly in the power of the ripple effect, where one person’s small action can ripple out to create big change. The Collective Project wanted other students to feel that even if you might not be able to devote all your free time to helping others, you can still start a ripple of change. Armed with gift cards and purple notecards detailing small acts of kindness, The Collective Project brand ambassadors spread throughout the Penn State campus. Touched with a ripple of kindness, students were encouraged to visit the "Empathy In Action" wall and complete their own small action—from holding the door for their fellow classmate to volunteering to tutor at nearby elementary schools. Over 500 acts of kindness were completed from the "Empathy in Action" wall. The impact of the event will have lasting effects as well. Over 50 students volunteered to become part of Empower Orphans, helping Neha continue to grow her organization. In the wise words of Neha Gupta, "It is our time to be the igniters of change. Find a cause that touches your heart. Convert your empathy into action and let those actions ripple out." We look forward to seeing the power that words can have when we highlight our next story, already live on OneNote.com/CollectiveProject. Get OneNote       |     Follow OneNote      The post OneNote—a collective ripple appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake introduces the show with Richard diZerega and Frank Marasco. The main interview this week is with James Montemagno from Xamarin. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP40.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates The API Economy: Consuming our web API from a Single Page app by Kirk Evans Making seattle.master responsive by Heather Soloman Creating an Azure Logic app that connects with SharePoint Online by Corey Roth Key skills and topics for today’s SharePoint/Office 365 developer by Chris O’Brien Add custom ribbon button in site page to popup all SharePoint apps by Andre Lage Show notes Xamarin.com James blog James code samples Office 365 API and Xamarin samples Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About James I am currently a Developer Evangelist at Xamarin.I have been a .NET developer for over a decade working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. Before joining Xamarin I was a professional mobile developer on the Xamarin platform for over two years, with several published apps on iOS, Android and Windows. In my spare time you will find me most likely cycling around Seattle or guzzling gallons of coffee at a local coffee shop. About the host Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 040 on Xamarin development with James Montemagno appeared first on Office Blogs.

When we announced Sway, we knew that people would want to work on standout class projects, eye-catching business reports, engaging vacation recaps, or more, together—it’s the way things are done now, right? But Sway up until now has been a tool for individual authors to create polished content in a new and interactive way to share with their audiences. However, we know you’ve asked for shared editing in Sway in our feedback channels (such as UserVoice), and that Office has delivered real-time editing and collaboration features for years, allowing people to work together to share their collective ideas. On top of that, we can’t tell you how many times that we on the Sway team have said to each other, "I wish I could work on this Sway with you!" So now we’re rolling out co-authoring in Sway! Whatever you want to make, it’s easy to create and edit Sways with other people. Simply share an edit link with anyone you’d like to work with. When your family, friends, classmates or colleagues click the link and log in, your Sway will show up on their "My Sways" page, too (with an icon indicating it’s a shared Sway to help you all stay organized). They can edit the Sway just as you can—and at the same exact time as well. As always with Sway, your work is saved automatically as you go along. Sound good? Read on to learn more about how it works: Invite others to edit a Sway you’ve created In the top right, tap or click Share and select the new add an author icon to generate an edit link. Then copy the URL and share it via email, social media, or however else you wish—with however many people you want to work with. Tap or click Share and select the new add an author icon to generate an edit link. Simply copy the edit link and share it with however many people you want to work with. Keep track of who is editing and who has access It’s easy to check who has editing permissions to one of your Sways, as well as which Sways you can edit which have been shared with you by others. On your My Sways page, tap or click the shared Sway icon for any Sway to see who has access to edit it. You can also now tap or click the My Sways drop-down next to filter your view of your My Sways page to show just your own Sways, Sways that have been shared with you, or both combined. To see who has access to edit any particular shared Sway, tap or click the shared Sway icon (which has two silhouettes on it). If you’re editing a Sway at the same time as other people, you can also see a count of how many people are working on the Sway at the same time as you, and who they are! Also, you can see where in the Sway other people are editing so you can avoid stepping on each other’s edits (it’s like two people trying to use the same keyboard at the same time). You’ll see their initials show up next to whatever Card they’re currently editing. If you do try to edit the exact same location that someone else is modifying, the last one to make an edit wins. Go ahead, try this at home! But then be nice and let people get their work done in peace. J It’s easy to see how many other people are editing a Sway at the same time as you, and where in the Sway they’re working. Revoke editing permissions and remove other authors As the original owner of a Sway, it’s easy for you to remove other editors and revoke all edit and view links to your Sway. Simply tap or click Share in the top right, select Need to revoke access? and then select Revoke All Shared Links. If you want to share editing or viewing links again, or with a new set of people, simply repeat the sharing process described earlier. Make a copy of a Sway We’ve also received a lot of requests from people who want to easily make a copy of a Sway, for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s because you want to copy that book report template you used last month, or create multiple versions of the same presentation (maybe one for each client you work with). We think now is a great time to roll out the ability to copy a Sway, together with shared editing. Say you’re ready to work together, but you aren’t quite sure how the other people will change your lovingly-crafted Sway. Now you can make a copy of your Sway to preserve that original so you don’t have to worry. Making a copy is also the easiest way to make your second and third Sways once you have one you like! It’s also a great way to have a template Sway for future Sways you might want to create. For example, a teacher can now create a template report for his or her students to use as a basis for their work. When duplicating the template, Sway adds a personal copy to their account, without affecting the original. To copy a Sway you’re editing or viewing, tap or click the … in the top right and select Duplicate this Sway. Also, on your My Sways page, simply tap or click the … for a desired Sway and then click or tap the middle icon, which looks like a stack of documents. To make a copy of a Sway from your My Sways page, tap or click … on the Sway and then tap or the middle icon. A couple fun things to try now that you can create and edit Sways with others Live Swaying in class—Project a Sway in a classroom, and watch how a group of students can contribute their ideas to it together at the same time. We already know of teachers who have students each make their own Sways, and then collect these Sways together into a single Sway using the embed feature. Now students can add their work directly to a class Sway that can be shared with parents as easily as sending the link! Capturing an event—Use Sway at an event to do a live blog with other attendees—it’s a new way to "cover" a conference in real-time while allowing letting others follow along who are not attending. Everyone in attendance can add to their section of notes and other authors can watch it update live while previewing the Sway! Working together—Of course, try out working together on some of the most common scenarios: writing reports, designing projects, crafting proposals or piecing together presentations. We on the Sway team are using these collaboration features all the time now—including for our own telemetry reports, where we periodically make a copy to generate a record, yet keep the original Sway up-to-date with the latest information and analysis. Try these scenarios out and give us feedback! Let us know what other collaboration scenarios you’d like to use Sway for. Drop a note on our UserVoice page so we can read the details, see what suggestions others have contributed, and vote on them as well! What’s next for Sway collaboration features? It’s been a fun journey building these collaboration features—check out this blog post for more background from our team. Of course, this is just the first step towards making Sway a truly collaborative app you can use to bring your ideas together with others’ using Sway’s canvas. We know we have more work to do, but in the spirit of Sway Preview we wanted to get this initial feature set in your hands right away and get feedback as early as possible. We need your feedback to help fine tune the current collaboration experience and prioritize all the different potential improvements we could make. As always, contact us through UserVoice to let us know your thoughts and vote on ideas, or join in the conversation by commenting in UserVoice to tell us why a feature is important. We’re excited to hear from you! —Sway team, @Sway   Get Sway | Follow Sway The post Sway is now collaborative—create and edit together with others! appeared first on Office Blogs.

We’re excited to announce today that Sway is now collaborative and lets you create and edit together with others. Check out this blog post for more detail. One of the great things about working at Microsoft is that you can build on the work of other teams. Several members of the Sway team formerly worked on Word and OneNote. We’re able to learn from that experience as well as build on some shared pieces of technology in Office. We’ve built the core collaboration infrastructure for Sway based on the co-authoring technology pioneered in OneNote several years ago, which has been lighting up across Office over the last number of years. Building on our shared technology helps us not only get these features into your hands sooner, but also addresses the really hard challenges. For example, while it is not uncommon for online editing tools to support co-authoring these days, especially tools with only basic feature sets, it is much harder to find tools that reliably support this scenario when the authors go offline. Think about this challenge for a moment—if you can assume that everyone is online, you can send the edits to all the co-authors, and things will generally work OK if you do that with little delay. If someone goes offline, most tools drop that user and they can no longer edit. But in Office, we think that scenario is really important—who knows what the network is doing and when it will be there? When an editor goes offline though, the problem of syncing up later becomes far harder. Not only do they no longer see what others are doing, they make edits of their own—perhaps moving or deleting things others have modified, moved or deleted. This is a difficult problem, and OneNote and Word have really worked hard to ensure collaboration is seamless in the current versions. In Sway that infrastructure is there for when the day comes that we too support offline editing. (And yes, we want that!) As you may have noticed, Office apps such as the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote all support real-time co-authoring and have been advancing their capabilities in this space (use them for free at office.com). Sway gets to draft off of their work, so we’re much obliged to our colleagues. —Sway team, @Sway   Get Sway     | Follow Sway     The post More background on building collaboration into Sway appeared first on Office Blogs.

With the 2015 Cricket World Cup in full swing, there’s all sorts of folks who are interested in digging into the details about their home team, their upcoming rivals or their favorite players. With all the data available, how do you get it into shape so that you can analyze what’s important to you (or your team)? This is a job for Excel and its data analysis tools—Power Query and Power View. In this post, we explore how to grab Cricket data from a handful of different sources, mash it up using Excel’s Power Query and then, with Power View, visualize the results in ways that are informative, interactive, interesting and even cool. One of the PowerView sheets from one of ten Power View sheets in the workbook. Want to follow along, or see all this for yourself? You can download the workbook and check out what we’ve done: WCRecords_Cricket_v2.xlsx Let’s take a look at the steps taken to create this workbook. Along the way, feel free to imagine how a data analysis project of your own might be similar. Find interesting data First, we need to find some interesting data, and there’s an ocean of interesting data online. For the Cricket World Cup, we used www.cricketarchive.com, which has all sorts of public data organized into tables based on various slices—players, teams, seasons—that is interesting to analyze, mash-up and visualize. (The term mash-up means the same as transform, it’s just more fun to say). Now that we found a data source, we are ready to bring it into our workbook and begin to shape or merge it in ways that were interesting to us. That’s a job for Power Query. Connect to the data using Power Query Power Query excels (no pun intended) at connecting to all sorts of different data sources. Whether the data is in a workbook, in a company database, an OData feed or some website that has nifty tables posted, Power Query can connect to any—or all of them. But what’s even more compelling is that Power Query then allows you to take all those different connections and shape, merge, append or otherwise mash them up however you want. In our case, we wanted to connect to a bunch of the tables from www.cricketarchive.com and create connections among them to see how different players, teams, and countries or regions have fared in their competitions over the years. For example, we connected to the cricket archive from Power Query to make data available within our workbook. From there we were able to make a bunch of other connections to that site, all of which are available in the workbook. But it’s not enough just to link to data, once we have a connection to the data, we want to shape and transform it in ways that meet our needs. Clean up and transform data using Power Query Connecting to online data is pretty cool, but that’s just the tip of the Power Query iceberg of functionality. Beneath the surface, Power Query is a powerhouse of data transformation, letting you shape any data source in all sorts of ways—without changing the underlying data source. That point is worth clarifying: when you transform data (remove columns, change data types, merge data sources, so on) using Power Query, you only transform your view (or instance) of the data. The underlying data source remains unchanged. Let’s use an analogy, to illustrate this important point. Let’s say you have an app on your phone that displays pictures. With that app, you can put special lenses on any picture to give the picture a special hue, warp it—or apply other fun transformations to the picture. You apply these transformations to the picture, so that your view of the photo is how you want it—but the original photo remains unchanged. The same goes with Power Query transformations—you can adjust your view of the underlying data sources, and bring your view into Excel for further analysis, but the underlying data sources remain unchanged. Back to our cricket data. In this workbook we performed transformations such as: Renamed columns Split columns Changed data types Removed null values from columns Merged with additional data sets Other transformations We specified these transformations in Query Editor, which is where Power Query queries are created, modified, managed or changed. You can open Query Editor from the Power Query ribbon in Excel. Simply select Show Pane to display all queries in the workbook and then double-click the query from the Workbook Queries pane. Steps to launch the Query Editor in order to specify transformations in the selected query. Once the query is opened in the Query Editor window, transformations made in the query are recorded in the Applied Steps section, in the order they were applied. When Power Query runs the query again (remember, against the original and unchanged data sources) your view of that data (transformed by your applied steps) can be created again with fidelity. We applied a bunch of transformations—on a bunch of different tables we found at www.cricketarchive.com—and had a pretty good data model against which we could start our analysis. And perhaps the most interesting and compelling way of analyzing data is doing so with visualizations. To see a step-by-step tutorial on how to combine and transform data using Power Query, check out this article. And remember, you can also download the workbook  and play with it all you want. Now that we used Power Query to transform the data, visualizing the data is a job for Power View. And that brings us to our final step. Visualize the data using Power View With the data transformed, it’s time to glean interesting facts, trends and insights from what we how have. To create visualizations, we need a new Power View report sheet, which is created as its own sheet in the workbook. To insert a Power View sheet, select Power View on the ribbon and then click the Power View button. When a new Power View sheet is created, the Power View Fields pane is displayed, and beside it, a blank canvas awaits your creativity.  Blank Power View sheet. To get started, simply drag a field from Power View Fields and drop it onto the canvas. Power View creates a basic visualization, based on the field added to the canvas. Note that you can create visualizations by dragging fields to the box at the bottom of the Power View Fields pane—either approach creates a visualization. Drag another field onto the canvas (even onto the visualization Power View just created), and the fun begins. You can play around with the fields and visualizations until you get the desired visualization. The following image shows two fields that have been dropped onto the canvas and a third being added. Ground was added first and then Runs margin was dropped on top of it. Losing team is being added to the existing visualization. The next image shows the Power View visualization after the Losing team field is dropped onto the canvas: Looks pretty basic, we know. But with a bit of creativity, or some intent on what you want to analyze and learn, you can create all sorts of interesting visualizations, or collections thereof, with Power View. To learn more about how to create visualizations, take a look at this series of tutorials. The following three images show additional Power View visualizations. The first one shows centuries by players over many years of the Cricket World Cup, the second demonstrates how to interact with Power View visualizations, and the third shows batsman aggregates across Cricket World Cups. The Power View reports are interactive, too. Here’s the same report, with 2011 selected: And here’s another Power View report, with a completely different visualization: There are many more Power View reports in the workbook, which you’re welcome to check out for yourself—just download the workbook and explore. We hope you enjoyed this post, and best of luck to you and your favorite cricket team! We look forward to writing more posts in the future. —Selvakumar Rajakumar, senior support escalation engineer for the SQL Business Intelligence team (CSS) —Muthukumaran Arumugam, support engineer for the SQL Business Intelligence team (CSS) —Carla Sabotta, senior content developer for the SQL Server team —David Iseminger, senior content developer for the Power BI team   ——————————- Power Query for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2010 Professional Plus with Software Assurance, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone.  Learn more about how to get started with Power Query for Excel. Power View for Excel is available with an Office 365 ProPlus subscription, Office 2013 Professional Plus or Excel 2013 Standalone.  Learn more about how to get started with Power View for Excel. Learn about all the powerful data analysis features in Excel and take your analysis further by sharing and collaborating on business insights with colleagues using Power BI. The post Cricket World Cup fever-analyzing the data with Power Query appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Excel was written by Felienne Hermans, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where she heads the Spreadsheet Lab. Should a university teach a course on Excel? I have heard this question a lot. But while doing research for my Ph.D. thesis at Delft University of Technology, I noticed the whole world is run by Excel. A manager at a big Dutch bank once told me, "If email goes down, that will be uncomfortable, but if Excel stops working, we’ll all go home." Excel is so omnipresent in business, yet, we at the university do not help students become proficient in the application. For example, I was recently visited by a student from the Architecture department. For his graduation project, he was supposed to create a spreadsheet calculating the impact of different building styles. The model was not the problem, he told me, but rather he needed to know how to build the spreadsheet and ensure the calculations were correct. He needed my help. And he was not the only one. Many of our graduates will work with spreadsheets in their jobs, probably every week. They are going to need to use spreadsheets to calculate the carry load of bridges, do investment planning or keep track of their work in the biology lab. The reality is that Excel is an important tool to learn because it is powerful enough to model many aspects of the world and simple enough to be understandable by most. As a professor at the Delft University of Technology, I pitched the idea of teaching Excel skills as a university-wide elective. There was some initial resistance, because, again, why are we teaching students about a specific tool? And the elective was supposed to be for students of all majors, which presented some administrative issues. But after I started the class, we had students from many departments enroll. It was clear that the students saw value in learning about data analysis for various career paths. The participating students created wonderful projects like a model of water flow in Nigerian rivers. Not only was the class successful, but I realized the class could be useful beyond universities. Having 50 students take your class is great, but the world is big and many people could benefit from my knowledge on Excel and data analysis. The opportunity came when my university started to offer free courses online using edX, a non-profit organization started by MIT and Harvard and one of the leading massive open online course (MOOC) providers. Using this platform, I am now able to offer my lessons to anyone that is interested. My classes consists of a series of videos and associated quizzes, which are graded by the system automatically. It is like having a little teacher in your computer, phone or tablet. Across eight weeks, I will provide weekly updates with new videos and exercises. Online learning experience on edX. My first course, called Data Analysis to the Max, starts April 7th and already has over 17,000 people enrolled from across the globe.  Map of students registered for class and introducing themselves on edX. There is plenty of room for more to join! To enroll, just sign up on the course page.  Will I see you in class? —Felienne Hermans The post Teaching Excel and data analysis—one professor’s efforts to prepare students for today’s careers appeared first on Office Blogs.

Join us Tuesday, April 14th at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET to learn the basics of OneDrive for Business, including using and updating the sync app, working with the OneDrive for Business site and common troubleshooting scenarios. To add the webcast to your calendar, visit Office 365| Summit Events. Presenters Rory Lenertz is a technical readiness engineer focusing on SharePoint Online. Rory has been working with SharePoint Online for over four years with an emphasis on Knowledge Base articles and support readiness materials. Brian Bishop is a technical readiness engineer. He’s worked for Microsoft since 2006 as a support engineer and content creator. His current focus is building SharePoint readiness training and documentation. For more information on future Office 365 support webcasts, visit the Office 365 l Summit website. The post Support Corner webcast—supporting common scenarios in OneDrive for Business appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Office 365 was written by Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy, principal at Nguyen Sieu School. As the principal of Nguyen Sieu School, one of the first private schools established in Vietnam, I feel tremendous responsibility to continuously improve the traditions established over the last 25 years, while introducing new approaches. I believe in student-centered learning and an increased emphasis on teaching English. My goal is to retain the traditional values of Vietnamese culture and learning, while equipping students to become global citizens. We have made great strides, becoming the first Vietnamese school to achieve accreditation with Cambridge International Examinations. In so doing, we have joined an international network of schools, which brings opportunities to equip our students with the confidence to compete with their international counterparts. Another way we maximize the capabilities of our students is through implementing better IT tools for teaching and learning. That’s why our students are using Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based communication and collaboration services. Achieving anytime, anywhere learning through online collaboration with teachers and classmates has been an empowering experience for our students. It is a great way to help our graduates to perform successfully in the twenty-first century workplace. We had been using Google Apps for Education for daily operations, but its components were not as integrated as we would have liked for implementing on a large scale across the school. I envisioned digital collaboration between students and teachers as another way to reinforce our school’s caring, supportive atmosphere—our teachers are regarded as the students’ second mothers and fathers—but we never achieved that level of connection using Google Apps. Today, students and teachers collaborate closely in their lessons using Microsoft OneNote and Microsoft SharePoint Online. They store documents in the cloud, downloading them to work with the latest version, on any device, anywhere they have Internet access. We have extended the learning environment beyond the classroom walls—and enhanced our reputation for innovation in education. Our teaching staff and administrators also share ideas with colleagues and stay organized using Office 365 services. Teachers use OneNote to develop lesson plans and everyone prefers the spontaneous exchanges we have on our new social network, Yammer, which is more efficient and private than posting on Facebook. We use Lync Online video conferencing to connect with colleagues in other Cambridge-accredited schools around the world—saving time and money in travel costs. All this began just six months ago, when I and the teaching staff attended a series of workshops at the school hosted by Microsoft Vietnam. That’s when we gained hands-on experience with Office 365. At Nguyen Sieu School, we are proud to have a team of qualified teachers who have a great passion for education and possess a willingness to learn new teaching methods. Office 365 has certainly sparked their enthusiasm for applying IT to their lessons. We began a pilot project at the school in September 2014, with a goal to have approximately 800 of our more than 1,800 students using Office 365 by the end of this academic year. In my job, I get the most satisfaction from watching the students grow, academically and socially. Watching them use Office 365 to gain confidence working with modern technology in all aspects of their lives has been wonderful, for me personally and the entire Nguyen Sieu School community. —Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy For more information, read the full story here at Why Microsoft. The post Choosing Office 365 to empower graduates to compete in a global workplace appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Excel was written by Purna Duggirala president of chandoo.org. We all know that Excel is packed with tons of powerful features, libraries of formulas and galleries of interesting charts, making it one of the most useful tools for business analysts. I believe that, among the great secrets of Excel, there are several that are easy to use and quickly add value to your work. Let’s take a look at these features—what I like to call the low-hanging fruit— including Sparklines, Conditional Formatting, Slicers and a few simple but useful formulas you may not have noticed. Sparklines Sparklines, first introduced in Excel 2010, are charts that provide simple visualization representations of trends across a row of your data—in a single worksheet cell. Sparklines offer excellent real-estate savings on crowded dashboard worksheets and can be extremely insightful for the amount of space used. This feature is unbelievably cool and ridiculously simple to use. And yet, not many analysts capitalize on these powerful tiny charts. To create your own Sparklines, select the data range and on the ribbon click Insert and then select the Sparklines type—Line, Column or Win/Loss.  Next enter the target range where you want the Sparkline displayed. That’s all there is to it. Conditional Formatting The options available in the Conditional Formatting feature allow you to quickly create heat maps, turning a table of data into a continuous spectrum of colors for insightful visual analysis.  This is a simple and effective way to explore your data and find interesting patterns. Below is a heat map where the color scale option was applied in literally 10 seconds from the same sales data used in the Sparklines example above to illustrate the high (dark green) and low (white) sales data across products and time. To create a heat map using Conditional Formatting, select your raw data and then on the ribbon under Home, click Conditional Formatting > Color Scales and then pick a color scale. You can also adjust color scale options by editing the formatting rule. SMALL and LARGE functions While everyone knows MAX and MIN functions, very few take advantage of LARGE and SMALL—functions that help you find the first, second or nth largest (or smallest) value in your data. Using the same sales data from the examples above, the LARGE functions is able to quickly identify the top two products for each month of our data. See the example below, done with the help of INDEX and MATCH, two other super useful functions for analysis. For more on these formulas, download this workbook: Powerful Excel features. Remove Duplicates There are many constants in corporate life and cleaning and organizing data is one of them. Remove Duplicates, a feature introduced in Excel 2007, remains one of my favorites. It is very easy to use and solves an important problem we all face—duplicates in data. Just select the data and then on the ribbon under Data, click the Remove Duplicates button and watch Excel clean your data. It’s that simple. Slicers Think of Slicers as visual filters. They help you quickly narrow down to a subset of data and visualize it (either in a raw data format or through a connected chart). Slicers were introduced in Excel 2010 and became even better in Excel 2013. For example, we can quickly create an interactive sales trend chart using slicers. When presenting sales data, we can now easily toggle between the different products using the same chart. To add a slicer to your charts in Excel 2013, select the data range and on the ribbon click Insert > Slicer, then select the part of your data that you want to use as a filter. For the example above, we chose the Product column.  Then you are done! To play with the interactive chart and see more on this technique, download this workbook: Powerful Excel features. Join me at the PASS BA Conference 2015 If you find these simple features useful, you are going to love the rest of them. Come and join me for three days of awesome insights, interactive labs, powerful demonstrations and full-day training on various advanced aspects of Excel at the PASS Business Analytics Conference in Santa Clara, CA April 20-22. There are a ton of sessions on all aspects of Excel, from formulas, to the intricacies of Power BI and other analytics tools. Take a look at the conference schedule and then sign-up for my pre-conference session on advanced and interactive charts to know how to impress your boss with jaw-droppingly awesome charts. Register today for the PASS Business Analytics Conference! —Purna Duggirala The post 5 easy and powerful Excel features you may not know about appeared first on Office Blogs.

Last year Office announced an ongoing partnership to create better connections between Office and Dropbox. We continue to work closely with the Dropbox team to make it easier to work with your Office applications and Dropbox. We’ve already connected your Office and Dropbox experience on your iOS and Android devices. Today, the next milestone in our partnership is available, integration between Dropbox on the web and Office Online. Now, when working in Office Online you can add your Dropbox account to easily browse, open and edit Office files with Office Online. You can also create new files in Office Online, and save them directly to your Dropbox. Add your Dropbox account to Office Online   Navigate and open files on Dropbox from Office Online Use Word Online to edit documents on Dropbox The same integration is available from Dropbox in a web browser. You can now access Office Online directly from the file you are viewing. Just click the Open button when you’re previewing a Word, PowerPoint or Excel file from Dropbox on the web, and you can edit the file right from your browser using Office Online. So whether you start in Office Online, or from Dropbox, it’s simple to work with Office and Dropbox on the web. All Dropbox and Office Online users have access to this new experience today. If you are an Office user that also uses Dropbox, go to www.Office.com today to give it a try. The post Office Online and Dropbox web integration now available appeared first on Office Blogs.

In this episode, Jeremy Thake and Richard diZerega interview Todd Baginski about the Property Inspector hero demo on top of the Office 365 platform. http://officeblogspodcastswest.blob.core.windows.net/podcasts/EP41.mp3 Download the podcast. Weekly updates Populate your Office 365 Developer Tenant with sample data Updated Fiddler OAuth Inspector Office 365 Dev Patterns and Practices in upcoming conferences PnP app model recipes Remote Timer Jobs Site Columns and Content Types Site Provisioning Themes Show notes Property Inspector on dev.office.com TechEd Europe debut of Property Inspector ITUnity development articles Got questions or comments about the show? Join the O365 Dev Podcast on the Office 365 Technical Network. The podcast RSS has been submitted to all the stores and marketplaces but takes time, please add directly with the RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Office365DeveloperPodcast. About Todd Baginski Todd Baginski is an nine-time Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP and SharePoint Top 25 Influencer who uses Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, Mobile, Office, and cloud technologies to create Internet websites, mobile apps and line of business applications for businesses of all sizes. Todd works closely with Microsoft to create demos, code samples and articles to help developers around the world learn how to properly implement SharePoint, Office, mobile, and cloud technologies. In his free time Todd enjoys playing with his son, relaxing with his wife, and playing a variety of sports like skiing, lacrosse, hockey and softball. About the hosts Jeremy is a technical product manager at Microsoft responsible for the Visual Studio Developer story for Office 365 development. Previously he worked at AvePoint Inc., a large ISV, as the chief architect shipping two apps to the Office Store. He has been heavily involved in the SharePoint community since 2006 and was awarded the SharePoint MVP award four years in a row before retiring the title to move to Microsoft. You can find Jeremy blogging at www.jeremythake.com and tweeting at @jthake.     Richard is a solution architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Dallas, Texas, where he helps large enterprise customers architect solutions that maximize their Microsoft investments. Although a developer at heart, he has spent a good portion of the last decade architecting SharePoint-centric solutions in the areas of Search, Portals/Collaboration, Content/Document Management, and Business Intelligence. He is a passionate and skillful technology evangelist with great interest in innovative solutions that include Azure, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Lync, Kinect, and much more. You can find his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/richard_dizeregas_blog/ and follow him on Twitter at @richdizz.   Useful links Office 365 Developer Center Blog Twitter Facebook StackOverflow http://aka.ms/AskSharePointDev http://aka.ms/AskOfficeDev http://aka.ms/AskOffice365Dev Yammer Office 365 Technical Network O365 Dev Podcast O365 Dev Apps Model O365 Dev Tools O365 Dev APIs O365 Dev Migration to App Model O365 Dev Links UserVoice The post Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 041 on the Property Inspector hero demo with Todd Baginski appeared first on Office Blogs.

Today’s post on Sway was written by guest blogger and Slideluck Youth Initiative artist teacher Winston Struye. My job title at the Slideluck Youth Initiative is "artist teacher" and it’s not a job I take lightly. To me, the role of an "artist teacher" is similar to that of a "creative leader" in a workplace: someone who can incite creativity in others, open people to possibilities that they did not see before, and, above all else, point students towards the "artist" they all have within them. My method of doing this is by providing students with tools (such as ideas, applications, methods) that can potentially illuminate their own creative potential. And Sway has turned out to be one of the most effective luminaries for showing my students the artists they all within themselves. The Slideluck Youth Initiative is a branch of Slideluck that does photography outreach programs in under-served communities in New York City and Los Angeles. The program aims to empower students by having them look through the lens of a camera. I hope that by teaching my students how to take photos of the world outside them every day, they will begin to discover insights about what they already have inside of them. You see, the class is labeled as "photography class," but the themes I get across to my students are more along the lines of critical observation, storytelling, and seeing things from new perspectives. I’m currently to teaching two classes-one with a group of middle-school students in the East New York, Brooklyn, and another class with high-school students in the Bronx. I’m always trying to bring technology into my lessons. However, there are often issues when it comes to accessibility. Although creative technologies are bountiful for professionals, they are often difficult for young students like mine to access. And on top of that, they often have a steep learning curve, which can easily lead to frustration and loss of excitement for the project. For most of the classes I had taught before, I had been simply showing individual photos one-by-one to the class and discussing them. But I felt as if I was missing a lot of the process, the story-building and story-thinking methods that are so beneficial to empowerment. I wanted the students to start building stories, not just images, and I needed a program that was intuitive and easy to use like a text editor, but also powerful enough to create something that students could feel like was something of an admirable quality. This is where Sway comes in. With Sway, my students can now create dynamic, engaging, multi-media stories without any technological roadblocks. Because Sway is so easy to use, I can have my students lay out their images in a manner that is confusion-free, dynamic, and fun—all essential parts of the creative process that I’m constantly trying to maintain. And, the finished product will always be something they are very proud of and have confidence in, prompting them to return to the program and create more stories; therefore building more creative thinking blocks in their brain. Sway is going to continue to be a vital part of the Youth Initiative, not only for the students to use to create things themselves, but in its ability for them (and us) to share their creations. We’ve always shared students’ work through our blog, but that has been limited to roughly one photo at a time. And with a million photo blogs out there, we’ve been searching for new ways to showcase the work we’ve been creating with our students. Needless to say, our students have already been showing their Sways to their friends and family, and Slideluck plans on doing the same, and with the greater Slideluck community to increase exposure for the Youth Initiative. But, all this being said, my students aren’t the only ones using Sway! As a photographer myself, I too am constantly looking for new tools in which to build, edit, and share stories that I capture with my camera.  For a long time, I’ve thought about how images can tell simple stories, but how it often takes the relationships between multiple images to show people the extent of ideas and emotions attached to those stories. To see both what I’ve created myself in Sway, and to learn a little bit more about the Slideluck Youth Initiative, the kids, and their work, please have a look at my Sway here: —Winston Struye   Get Sway | Follow Sway The post Sway guest blog—artist teacher Winston Struye appeared first on Office Blogs.

The March Office 365 updates cover an impressive range: previews, significant improvements, new capabilities and connectors, and a new app. You can now preview Office 2016 for Mac, send information in Gmail messages straight to OneNote, preview your notes in OneNote for iPhone, capture web content more easily with OneNote Clipper 2.0, and more. For Office 365 business users, three new previews are available: Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview, Skype for Business technical preview, and Office 2013 client modern authentication public preview. Admins can now manage access to data on mobile devices, and use the admin app to perform common tasks on the go. Excel Power Query and Delve got significant improvements, and there’s a new Salesforce app for Outlook. And for JavaScript developers, new capabilities for working with the Office 365 APIs are here. Leave us a comment to let us know what your favorite new feature is. If you missed last month’s updates, see What’s new: February 2015. Office 365 Personal, Office 365 Home and Office 365 University updates Office 2016 Mac Preview is here—Office 2016 for Mac is designed to take advantage of the unique features of the Mac. It has full retina display support, full screen view, and even scroll bounce. And it includes updated versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook—with a redesigned ribbon, a refreshed task pane to make positioning, resizing, or rotating graphics easy, and new themes and styles. Office 2016 for Mac is cloud-powered, so you can access your files on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint on any device. Try the preview now. OneNote and Yammer welcome a new partner, Obindo—Obindo is the new Google Chrome extension that helps you capture ideas and files from Gmail and send them to OneNote or Yammer without leaving your inbox. Obindo routes all your great ideas, thoughts and files—which often get stuck in email—to OneNote, where you can work with them more easily. You can share a message in Gmail with others in your organization too, or start a conversation by clicking Yammer on the Obindo toolbar. Updates to OneNote for iPhone and OneNote for Mac—You can now preview notes in OneNote for iPhone, which is handy when you’re on the go and need to a find a specific note. You can also drag and drop your notebooks to easily re-order them. In OneNote for Mac, it’s now even easier to share notebooks. You can invite contacts to collaborate on notebooks, select whether they can view only or edit the notebooks, and remove access when needed. Introducing OneNote Clipper 2.0—This major update to OneNote Clipper makes capturing web content and enriching that content easier than ever. In response to popular user requests, the user interface was redesigned and new features were added, including a location picker to customize your clipping location, intelligence (for clipping just what you need, minus the clutter), and region clipping for Chrome. Sway updates—Sway makes it easy to add, visualize and share your content in new, interactive and exciting ways. Based on feedback from users, Sway was recently updated so it’s even easier to use and more powerful. You can now add OneNote images to Sway, use more third-party sources to embed web content, share your Sways in more ways to grow your audience, and more. Easier navigation and playback with Office Mix—Mixes, unlike other web videos, are partitioned by slides, not time, which makes it easier to re-watch parts—you just click the slide section on the timeline instead of dragging a slider to the right moment. You can also use the Slide Sorter to jump into and out of a mix fast, and the new Slide Content to easily navigate within online presentations and play back the slides you want. Office 365 for Business updates* The Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview is here—The preview gives IT pros and developers an opportunity to start testing the upcoming release. The preview doesn’t yet contain all the features planned for the final product, but new features will be delivered through monthly updates during the preview. New features include: data loss protection for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, significant technical improvements to Outlook, new deployments options and more. Skype for Business technical preview now available—Prepare your organization for Skype for Business! The technical preview of the Skype for Business client is already available, and the new Skype for Business client, server and online service will become generally available starting in April. Skype for Business is the next version of Microsoft Lync, and the technical preview gives current Lync customers a chance to try Skype for Business and get ready to upgrade. Office 2013 client modern authentication public preview—The Office 2013 client modern authentication features have moved to public preview. Modern authentication brings Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL)-based sign-in to Office 2013 Windows clients. Previously, only a private preview of modern authentication was available. Now modern authentication is available to any customer running the March 2015 or later update for Office 2013. The public preview program is easier to join and production support is included for participants. Office 365 Admin app updates—The Office 365 Admin app now enables you to complete common admin tasks when you’re away from your computer, including resetting passwords, adding new hires, or deleting users have left the company. And to help you stay up to date with what’s happening in Office 365, the app now includes the Message Center, the central location for Office 365 service communications. Improved management of Clutter—Clutter helps you focus on the most important messages in your inbox by moving lower priority messages out of your way into a Clutter folder. Now Office 365 administrators can ensure that critical messages make it into the inbox, personalize Clutter notifications, and set retention policies for Clutter folders. Built-in mobile device management now available—With mobile device management, you can manage access to Office 365 data across a diverse range of phones and tablets—including iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices—to help keep your data safe. The built-in mobile device management features are included at no additional cost in all Office 365 commercial plans, including Business, Enterprise, Education, and Government plans. Updates to Excel Power Query—Performance was significantly improved in loading queries and connecting to Excel workbooks. A new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online connector was added. And several improvements were made in the Query Editor to make some transformations easier, like calculating the difference between two Date/Time columns and disabling column name prefix in the Aggregate columns. Office Delve worldwide rollout, plus support for new content types—Delve has begun rolling out to all eligible Office 365 business customers worldwide. Delve surfaces relevant content and insights tailored to each person. It’s powered by the Office Graph, which applies machine learning to map the connections between people, content and interactions across Office 365. Delve now surfaces two new types of content:  links shared in Yammer and email attachments. Announcing Azure ExpressRoute connectivity to Office 365—Starting later this year, Office 365 customers will be able to use Azure ExpressRoute to establish a private, managed connection to Office 365. Currently, ExpressRoute provides customers with dedicated network connectivity through a private connection from their network to Microsoft Azure, and now the same option is available for connectivity to Office 365. New Salesforce App for Outlook—The new Salesforce App for Outlook gives you a great new way to work with Salesforce right from within Outlook. You can view Salesforce contacts, leads, accounts and opportunities in the context of an email from a customer. Salesforce for Outlook works with Outlook 2013, Office 365, Outlook for Mac and the Outlook Web App (OWA). You can download the Salesforce App for Outlook for free. Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online available from datacenters in Australia—Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online are now available from Australian datacenters. In addition, Office 365 has just successfully completed a formal security assessment for Unclassified Sensitive government data via Australian Government’s Independent Registered Assessors Program (IRAP), with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online currently under a similar IRAP assessment. These new local services will provide even faster performance, offer geo-redundant back-up, and help customers address data residency considerations. Office 365 Developer updates Increasing opportunities for JavaScript developers—New capabilities enable JavaScript developers to interact with the Office 365 APIs. With cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) support, they now have the choice to call the Office 365 APIs from the server side or client side, which means they can write single-page applications. The OneDrive for Business and Sites APIs have CORS support now, and Mail/Calendar/Contacts will get it soon. As more Office 365 API endpoints come online for services, they will also support CORS, including Office Graph, Yammer, Video Portal, Skype and content services. Please note that some of the updates may take time to show up in your Office 365 account, because they’re being rolled out to customers worldwide. —Andy O’Donald @andyodonald  ——————————————————————————- *Not all updates apply to every Office 365 plan; please check the individual post for specifics. The post What’s new: March 2015 appeared first on Office Blogs.