Increase Your Productivity With Office 365 on Your Mobile Phone

Jay HineTechnologyLeave a Comment

Office 365 Apps

Office 365 is now used by most people, especially in business. However, many people see it as just Email, Word & Excel.

Although these functions have changed the way we can work, what about Shared Files and To do Lists.

If you are not familiar with OneDrive and SharePoint these are both elements of Office 365 that allow you to share files and folders in the Cloud. This enables everyone to access these from any device and from anywhere.

Using a laptop is simple, but have you installed the OneDrive app onto your mobile device to access these files? The app not only gives you access to your OneDrive files but also gives access to the files saved within SharePoint. Just open the OneDrive App and along the bottom go to Libraries. This shows all the SharePoint sites you have access to. Files can be opened and attached to emails in the same way as you would from a laptop.

An added benefit of OneDrive is if you use your Mobile for taking most of your pictures you can turn on Camera Sync and all your pictures and videos are automatically uploaded, making a handy backup.

Finally, there is a little used app called Office which seems to get installed by default. I have long ignored this but recently found it to be extremely useful. Assuming you are using OneDrive and SharePoint this handy little App keeps track of all your recently opened documents, irrespective of which Microsoft product was used. A godsend if you can’t remember where it is located, whilst sitting on a train. The Office App also has some functions (called Actions) that allows you to convert documents to or from a PDF, scan a document to PDF, to name a few.

To Do List

Personally, I have tried some of the various To Do list Apps around, but my problem has always been I use Outlook for everything. I tag emails I want to have easy access to; I create tasks and want these listed with flagged emails the same way they are in Outlook.

The MS To Do app allows all this. When installing it you use your Office 365 details to login and hey presto there are all your Tasks and Flagged emails in one place.

Hiding the fact, you are out of the office and sitting on a beach

Using your mobile usually means that when you send an email you either have a very basic email signature or it says, “sent from my mobile”. Personally, I never liked this as it didn’t match our corporate branding and looked unprofessional.

By using Office 365 there are bolt-on’s, such as Exclaimer, that allow you to create an email signature which is used by all devices. Meaning that an email sent from a mobile looks the same as one sent from Outlook.

This is achieved by creating a template which is populated with the Office 365 details. Emails sent from any device pass through this add-on before leaving your mailbox and attaches the signature file.

Sounds complicated and expensive. The cost is around £2.50 (ex VAT) per mailbox per month. The hardest bit is creating the template, but we can help with that.

With all the above items in place you can work from a tablet or mobile and nobody would be any the wiser you're not sitting in an office!

If you would like any additional details of these Apps and add-ons, please give us a call on 01293 562 700.


About the Author

A picture of Jay Hine, the author of this blog

Jay Hine

IT Director


As a Director of Optima Systems Ltd Jay is responsible for overseeing Sales and Marketing, Human Resources, Customer Relations and Account Management. In addition, Jay is responsible for the design, development, efficiency and smooth running of the IT Networks of our clients, as well as our own technical infrastructure. More about Jay.


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