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If you're a fan of PowerPoint, you may have heard about Microsoft's latest presentation tool, Microsoft Sway. With Sway, you can create and share presentations like never before! In today's blog, we'll give you a basic overview as to what Sway can do as well as some of our personal favorite features. Let's dive in! Sway is a free app from Microsoft Office that helps gather, format, and share reports, newsletters, web pages, and presentations on an interactive, web-based canvas that looks great on almost any screen. That's right, we said interactive! Use videos or interactive charts to engage your audience like never before.

If you've got a really killer PowerPoint presentation but would like to extract all the information to Microsoft Word - you can. Sometimes this is necessary because the size of your PowerPoint presentation is rather large and you would like to share it with others over email or an intranet. Converting it to Word will help reduce the size and make it easier to view for everyone involved. It's also possible that you would like your slides presented as thumbnails, with or without speaker notes included, for easier reviewing, editing, or handing out during the presentation itself. You can convert your presentation in one of three ways.

Sounds like an awesome challenge, doesn't it? This was exactly the challenge that one of our customers Ernst Décsey, Intranet Manager from UNICEF posed in the YCN, Yammer Champion Community. His question was greeted with a flurry of amazing responses, which we just had to share here (with participants' permissions of course!)

In order to be taken seriously, small businesses need to convince customers of their professional ability and their value. Small businesses can punch above their weight by taking the time to go to market with a professional set of business documents, templates and content to ensure customers aren't dismissing them before they have a chance to pitch the value of their product or service. But how can small businesses deliver a professional image when they don't have the same resources as big businesses? Web-based solutions, also known as 'cloud solutions,' help small businesses maintain professional-looking documents even while collaborating and editing with employees in real-time from different locations. Gone are the days where employees hoped documents maintained proper spacing and margins; small businesses can now create materials in confidence and showcase their professional ability to customers. Below are just a few of the ways small businesses can ensure they are maintaining a professional appearance when it comes to the business communications: MAKE THE FIRST IMPRESSION A PROFESSIONAL ONE An email newsletter is often a small business' first connection with a potential customer; they can keep it professional by registering a business email domain (johndoe@yourbusiness.com) and sending all communications to customers and potential customers from there. Most cloud solutions offer a cost-efficient and easy way to customize emails with basic client information - small businesses should take the time to add a personal touch to connect with their customers. Messages should be short and to the point to ensure their email will bring value to potential customers. Email signatures should be simple, clean and professional, and employees shouldn't forget to run a spell-check before hitting send. CREATE CUSTOMER-READY DOCUMENTS Whether creating documents on an office desktop or on-the-go on a mobile or tablet device through Office Mobile Apps in Office 3

This episode marks the first in a three part series, as hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh go deeper on automating the new Office for your organization. Watch as they reveal the second XStream install of the season, as host and pilot Yoni attempts an Office 365 ProPlus install, with no Internet access, while performing outrageously high-G aerobatics.

Small businesses have enough to focus on without having to spend time and energy worrying about email, data storage or backup servers. In fact, most small businesses don't know or understand what a server is. The good news is that in today's technology environment, they don't need to. This is because more small businesses are rapidly moving from outdated technology solutions to Web-based solutions to power their company, also known as "moving to the cloud." By moving to cloud solutions like Office 365, small businesses find they can concentrate their resources on growing their business rather than trying to solve technical issues. Large enterprises typically have entire divisions dedicated to supporting and keeping their IT infrastructure up and running. Even though small businesses don't have this luxury, they can still punch above their weight by choosing the enterprise-grade IT services in Office 365 to help solve their most top-of-mind business challenges.

We're excited to announce a major upgrade for our Outlook.com app for Android devices that overhauls the entire user interface and provides a number of new features. You can get the latest app here. www.office.com/setup We believe that the best mobile experience is enabled through Exchange ActiveSync-which provides a rich, powerful, network-optimized experience for Windows Phone, iOS and other mobile devices. However, native support for Exchange ActiveSync on Android devices varies significantly and so we build a separate app to ensure as many people as possible can have a great Outlook.com experience across all their devices. As you've heard us talk about previously, the overall response to Outlook.com has been very positive. However, our Android app has been behind and so we're excited to take this large step forward. Starting today, you can get the same great Outlook.com look and feel you've come to love on Windows 8 and the web on your Android device.

When FHI 360 wanted to move to cloud-based business productivity services, the organization decided to implement a Microsoft cloud-based solution. We recently spoke to Douglas Wilkins, Director of IT Infrastructure at FHI 360, to learn how the company is benefiting: FHI360 logoQ: Please tell us about FHI 360. Douglas Wilkins: FHI 360 is a nonprofit human development organization dedicated to improving lives in lasting ways by advancing integrated, locally driven solutions. Our staff includes experts in health, education, nutrition, environment, economic development, civil society, gender equality, youth, research, technology, communication, and social marketing-creating a unique mix of capabilities to address today's interrelated development challenges. FHI 360 serves more than 60 countries and all US states and territories. Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration? Wilkins: We had a diverse IT infrastructure. Employees in the US had different IT toolsets and Internet access than staff in countries like Mozambique. Subscribing employees to a single, cloud-based solution was the most expedient way to ensure that everyone had the same IT tools, to work efficiently regardless of location. Migrating our communication and collaboration technologies to the cloud reduced much of the time required by our IT staff to manage divergent IT infrastructures and connectivity options found around the world. Q: What criteria did you use to select Microsoft as your vendor for cloud-based business productivity services? Wilkins: We wanted a vendor that demonstrated a real interest in our mission and goals, and that offered online business productivity tools tailored for the enterprise space. The capabilities of the Microsoft Services Consulting team, and the work of Intellinet, the partner Microsoft introduced us to, provided us with that. We migrated our 4,300 staff members around the world from diverse platforms to a Microsoft Offi

May's Customer of the Month is Melanie Hohertz, Online Communications Lead, Cargill. I've been supporting Yammer as a work platform for Cargill for almost a year. We're early in our adoption, but it's been an amazing experience. I am learning, daily, how Yammer can change the way people and teams work and add value in a company that is more than 140,000 strong and spread throughout 65 countries. Our network will pass 10,000 members soon and already, you can't stump us on anything. From food to agriculture to financial and industrial products and services, Yammer is helping Cargill use what Cargill knows, and that's a lot. Yammer can connect people across silos based on organization, geography and hierarchy. I've seen customer reps talking directly to product management, and senior leaders listening to recently-hired employees. We have new ways to realize the power of our communities of practice to speed up ideation and action. Sure, we still have a long road ahead before Yammer is as ubiquitous and instinctive as e-mail, but we throw a heck of a YamJam, and the signal-to-noise ratio in our network is beautiful.

Guest blogger Emily Warn is co-owner of Two Pens, which provides blogging services and teaches business how to write content that grows a social media following. My writer friends think I'm a geek. You can do what?! I can create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number. I know that is only the first rung of Excel Geek-dom, and unlike my compatriots, I aspire to climb into the ranks of those who know how to create snazzy charts and perform other formatting feats. Perhaps I'll be able to brand myself as a writer who plays with numbers.

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visio offers over 60 types of professional templates to build compelling diagrams, and organization charts are among most the frequently created. Visio organization charts are simple and visual, but what if you want to connect them to key business indicators tracked by your organization, such as sales by region, budget by department, vacation status, or training progress? Sometimes this information is located in another source, like Excel or a complex database. Data-linked diagrams let you add data to Visio diagrams-no code required-and anyone in an organization can quickly create such dashboards to get better insights into data using Visio Professional 2013 or Visio Pro for Office 365.

Headquartered in Bad Homburg, Germany, Fresenius Medical Care is one of the world's leading providers of products and services for individuals undergoing dialysis treatments. The company runs a network of more than 3,000 dialysis clinics around the world and treats more than 250,000 patients each year. The company had been using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 since 2010. In April 2012, the Fresenius Medical Care Global Manufacturing Operations adopted SharePoint 2013 with a long-term vision to migrate all SharePoint 2010 dashboards and use SharePoint 2013 as the central collaboration and social system.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: The new admin center reached general availability one month ago. This was a big milestone in our mission to provide you with a first-class admin experience, with tools that enable you to efficiently manage all aspects of the service. We continue to evolve the admin center. This month, we focused on providing you with additional usage insights, including new usage reports, the preview of the Office 365 adoption content pack in Power BI and more role-based permissions through a new Power BI admin role. Here's a summary of the October updates: NEW USAGE REPORTS STARTING TO ROLL OUT TODAY In March, we launched the new reporting dashboard in the Office 365 admin center that makes it easier for you to efficiently monitor your service, identify issues, plan training and report back on the investment to your management. Today, we are happy to announce four new usage reports for active users, Email clients, Skype for Business clients and Office 365 Groups, that provide you with additional insights about how users in your organization are using and adopting Office 365. Here's a look at each report: Active Users report-Lets you see which of your users actively use one or more of the different Office 365 services. This report is especially helpful for admins to identify users for whom they might want to plan some additional training and communication. Often, after being assigned an Office 365 license, users need a helping hand to get started with the different services. They might not know how to activate the product or how the product can help them to be more productive. The image below shows all users that are licensed for one or more products and the last date they used any of those products. By clicking the Column icon, admins can modify the table to see which license has been assigned to a user, as well as when the license was assigned to the user. admin-center-october-1 - www.office.com/setup Blogs Skype for Business clients used r

Small businesses have enough to focus on without having to spend time and energy worrying about email, data storage or backup servers. In fact, most small businesses don't know or understand what a server is. The good news is that in today's technology environment, they don't need to. This is because more small businesses are rapidly moving from outdated technology solutions to Web-based solutions to power their company, also known as "moving to the cloud." By moving to cloud solutions like Office 365, small businesses find they can concentrate their resources on growing their business rather than trying to solve technical issues.

I have an online business that is based on jira. With the power bi jira connector I was able to achieve easy data export, which means that I no longer need to do it manually. The experts at alphaserve have made everything user-friendly. I encourage you to read more about how this thing works if you are interested.

It's perfect for small businesses, thank you!

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Last year, we released Microsoft Bookings to customers in the U.S. and Canada, introducing an easy way for small businesses to schedule and manage appointments with their customers. Today, we are pleased to announce that we're beginning to roll out the service to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers worldwide. Based on your feedback, we are bringing several new features to Bookings: Add your Office 365 calendar to Bookings-Connect your Office 365 calendar to Bookings, so that the times you are busy will automatically be blocked in your public Booking page. Add buffer time before and after your appointments-Do you need prep time before or after an appointment? Adding buffer time to a service automatically blocks that time in your Booking page too. Bookings apps for your iOS and Android phone-Now you can book an appointment, contact a customer or check a staff member's appointments while away from the office. Customize your Booking page-We added more color customization options, so you can better personalize your Booking page. These new capabilities will start showing up automatically in Bookings in the coming weeks. Let's take a detailed look at what's new. ADD YOUR OFFICE 365 CALENDAR TO BOOKINGS One of the top pieces of feedback we've heard is that you want to be able to add events from your Office 365 calendar to Bookings. So, we added integration between these calendars to help you avoid booking customer meetings during the time you've set aside for personal appointments, staff and partner meetings or other aspects of running your business. To add Office 365 calendars to Bookings, click the Staff tab on the left navigation panel. On the Staff details page, select the Events on Office 365 calendar affect availability checkbox. www.office.com/setup Add Office 365 calendar events to Bookings. Once you activate this option, the system automatically blocks busy times on the Bookings calendar and on the self-ser

Are you using the new Project and wishing you could enhance its powerful capabilities with apps? Project 2013 has great extensibility potential-even across devices. The new apps for Project enhance capabilities of Microsoft Project 2013 applications, including Project Pro for Office 365, Project Professional 2013, Project Online and Project Server 2013. www.office.com/setup HOW DO I ADD AN APP TO PROJECT PRO FOR OFFICE 365 OR PROJECT PROFESSIONAL 2013? Open Project. On the Ribbon, click PROJECT, then click Apps for Office. www.office.com/setup All apps for Project associated with your account will show up. If you need to acquire new Apps from the Microsoft Office Store, click the Find more apps in the Office Store link and follow the instructions on the screen. www.office.com/setup START USING YOUR APPS The example below shows a project plan that has been synchronized to a project site in SharePoint or SharePoint Online and the highlighted app on the right SharkPro Insite shows data from your project site next to your document. www.office.com/setup Here are apps you can acquire for Project Pro for Office 365 or Project Professional 2013: Sensei Task Analyzer SharkPro SharePoint Insite™ for Project Visit the Office Store for more apps HOW DO I ADD AN APP TO PROJECT ONLINE OR PROJECT SERVER 2013? Choose the site where you want to add the app. On the Gear menu, select Add an app. www.office.com/setup The apps you see will depend on your corporate environment and on whether you have already acquired apps from the Office Store. If you don't see the apps you want in the list, you can add them. On the left side of the screen, click the SharePoint Store link to browse all available apps. Follow the on-screen instructions to add the apps you want. www.office.com/setup Once the app is added to your site, launch the app by clicking on its name in the left hand navigation or see all apps that are ready to use on your site through the Site co

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: PowerPoint allows you to add audio to your presentation. For example, you could add background music to one slide, a sound effect to another, and even record your own narration or commentary. You can then edit the audio to customize it for your presentation. Optional: Download our practice presentation. Watch the video below to learn more about inserting audio in PowerPoint. TO INSERT AUDIO FROM A FILE: In our example, we'll insert an audio file saved locally on our computer. If you'd like to work along with our example, right-click this link to our example file and save it to your computer (music credit: Something Small (Instrumental) by Minden, CC BY-NC 3.0). From the Insert tab, click the Audio drop-down arrow, then select Audio on My PC. Inserting audio from a file - www.office.com/setup Locate and select the desired audio file, then click Insert. Selecting the desired audio file - www.office.com/setup The audio file will be added to the slide. The inserted audio file - www.office.com/setup RECORDING YOUR OWN AUDIO Sometimes you may want to record audio directly into a presentation. For example, you might want the presentation to include narration. Before you begin, make sure you have a microphone that is compatible with your computer; many computers have built-in microphones or ones that can be plugged in to the computer. TO RECORD AUDIO: From the Insert tab, click the Audio drop-down arrow, then select Record Audio. Clicking Record Audio - www.office.com/setup Type a name for the audio recording if you want. Renaming the audio recording - www.office.com/setup Click the Record button to start recording. Clicking the Record button - www.office.com/setup When you're finished recording, click the Stop button. Clicking the Stop button - www.office.com/setup To preview your recording, click the Play button. Previewing the recording - www.office.com/setup When you're done, click OK. The au