Day 17 – Online Apps
10/07/2014
30 Days with Office 365 for Educators - Day 17
The last week of posting was somewhat detoured to cover some of the migration issues that we faced as our CEPS faculty and staff successfully moved to Office 365. Overall the process went smoothly. There are still a couple of lingering issues regarding new contact groups and syncing of the Offline Global Address Book for our Outlook 2013 Desktop Client users but otherwise we are happily moving forward.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled postings.
Online Apps
Office 365 offers tremendous flexibility with the creation of new documents. One of the great benefits to having Office 365 hosted in the cloud is that you do not have to have the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote installed on the local computer to use it. You can just sign-in to your Office 365 account and use the online browser version to create basic documents.
Office 365 offers online versions of the big four Microsoft Office applications. Microsoft calls these online versions apps. There are four main online apps in Office 365: Word Online, Excel Online, PowerPoint Online, and OneNote Online.
There is a small caveat in that the online versions of the Office apps are a bit watered-down and do not contain the full functionality of the traditional Office Suite of applications. This is to be expected as apps typically do not have the functionality as the full-featured application, that's why we call them apps. If you do need the power of the traditional Office Suite applications the full versions are still available to install and use on your local computer.
The online versions however are incredibly useful as they are always available online to access at anytime and anywhere you have an Internet connection. The online apps may not have the full functionality of their application brethren but they are easily accessed and work across the different computing platforms. This cross-platform availability is yet another benefit of working with Office 365 and perfect for digital nomads like myself.
I previously mentioned the OneDrive online storage service in another post. If you are going to work with online apps it stands to reason that you will need an online storage place to save your files. That online storage place is OneDrive, your hard drive in the cloud.
Advantages of Office 365 Online Apps vs. Traditional Office Applications
There are two other major differences to understand regarding the way that the online apps work compared to the full featured applications.
The first has to do with the way that you save your online files to OneDrive. When you create a new online document it is automatically saved to OneDrive. There is no Save button for the online apps. You will still need to change the document name to what you want to call it but each keystroke is automatically saved as you type. Welcome to the wonderful world of the cloud!
By default new documents are stored to the root folder of OneDrive. Get in the habit of naming the document as soon as you create it by changing the name in the title bar of the online app. Also, get in the habit of moving the file to the appropriate folder once it is created so you can keep your OneDrive neat and tidy. Otherwise, OneDrive becomes a dumping ground for different types of files.
Tip: If you navigate to the OneDrive folder first before creating a new document it will be created and stored in that folder.
The second major difference with Office 365 online apps is that they all support collaborative multi-authoring! If you share a file with others using OneDrive you can give them editing rights and others can edit an online document at the same time you are!
Multi-authoring opens up all types of collaboration scenarios for teachers and students.
Stay tuned for future posts about the collaborative possibilities that Office 365 Online Apps provide.
Keep on Learning,
Tom Grissom, Ph.D.
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