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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.

Meeting notes, vacation plans, grocery lists, great quotes, notes to self-let me count the ways to use OneNote. Consolidate all of your crucial information chunks and snippets in one place, then link with OneDrive to share this virtual notebook with yourself (roaming), with other people (collaboration), and with other devices (OneNote ecosystem). Can't view this video? It's also on Microsoft Showcase. Need a peek? Here's a 30-second trailer. Note SkyDrive is now OneDrive, and SkyDrive Pro is now OneDrive for Business. Read more about this change at From SkyDrive to OneDrive. What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar Using OneNote for your next household project Ways to share OneNote meeting notes Share with OneNote, even if you don't have it OneNote for Android, iPhone, iPad. References for this webinar Share your notebook (video) Share notes with other people (how-to) Work together on a shared notebook (OneNote 2010 training course) Share notes in a meeting (how-to) Plan a trip with others (video) OneNote keyboard shortcuts (2010) and (2013) OneNote mobile apps Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series. -Doug Thomas

Ready to get a hands-on, in-person learning experience on how Microsoft Project can help you get more out of your projects and optimize your portfolio? Microsoft and our partner community host events in cities all around the U.S. where you'll have the opportunity to learn more about Project and what it can do to help you streamline your work and achieve your strategic objectives. Please add this page to your Favorites and check back often, as new events are regularly being scheduled! May 30th Cambridge, MA Conference 2014 Roadshow with Project Gold Certified PPM Partner Campana & Schott. Join us for these free half-day events to gain insight on current trends and the latest developments on Project Online and earn 3 PDUs. Registration link You can also register here to attend our free Project webcast series-sessions are held on the 3rd Tuesday of each month!

We're bringing Yammer to a city near you with Yammer on Tour-a free event series that brings together customers, partners and thought leaders for a unique opportunity to hear our vision for enterprise social, network with like-minded peers, and learn directly from customers how to usher in success in today's rapidly changing business environment. Yammer on Tour features an action-packed half-day agenda including: Keynotes and appearances by Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni and customers Breakout sessions featuring product insights and expert discussions on enterprise social success Hands-on training and certification Networking and demos from Yammer and our partners in the expo hall Join us at Yammer on Tour in the following cities: New York-April 9: Register today Chicago-April 16: Register today Dallas-May 15: Registration opening soon We look forward to seeing you at one of these events!

This post is brought to you by Seayoung Rhee, Product Marketing Manager in the SharePoint Product Marketing Group. Reliable business intelligence and insight are key to a thriving business. Excel, SharePoint and Office 365 make business intelligence (BI) in the new Office more accessible to everyone across an organization as part of their everyday work. New and enhanced features in familiar tools such as Excel empower everyone in a business to easily explore, model, analyze, and visualize data from various sources. With SharePoint, users of all levels can collaboratively develop and share insights through dashboards and scorecards, and this experience continues seamlessly in the cloud with Office 365. For corporate environments, these features are further enhanced by SQL Server for higher levels of performance and scalability both on-premises and in the cloud with BI Azure. Ultimately with Microsoft BI, anyone in the organization can develop the insights that help drive new discoveries and make better, more informed decisions. EXPLORE YOUR DATA PowerPivot was a popular add-in to Excel 2010, allowing users to create large data models with hundreds of millions of rows in Excel. This feature is now natively embedded in Excel to reduce the hassle of downloads and installation. PowerPivot is also supported in SharePoint with SQL Server Analysis Services where the workbooks with PowerPivot models can be shared broadly across the organization. New features like Quick Explore aid users in navigating their data, and Quick Analysis provides previews of their charts, graphs, and scorecards. Users can: Combine and analyze large datasets with PowerPivot Summarize data and discover trends with Quick Explore Instantly preview charts and pivot tables with Quick Analysis www.office.com/setup VISUALIZE YOUR INSIGHTS Introduced with SQL Server 2012, Power View provided a canvas to create visual dashboards in SharePoint. Now this feature is embedded into Excel and SharePoint so

Most people know that you can create PowerPoint presentations with pictures, music, images, web content, and text, but one little known trick is the ability to save PowerPoint presentations as videos. PowerPoint presentations have been a long time favorite for use in business and academic presentations all over the world. They are highly versatile and offer a wide variety of features that you can use to enhance them. In order to save your PowerPoint as a video you will first need to create a presentation or download the sample we used for this tutorial. Once you have the document open, you will need to save it as a video. Begin by pressing "File." sshot-1 - www.office.com/setup Instead of following the logical train of thought and opening the "Save" section, you will need to click on "Export," then click on "Create a video." sshot-2 - www.office.com/setup Once you do this, you will see the "Create a Video" option. This will offer a few options in the form of two drop-down menus and a time value box. sshot-3 - www.office.com/setup The first drop-down box is where you will choose the quality of your exported video. These three options will also determine the size of your exported video file. For the purposes of this example, we will choose the second option to reduce the size of the video without compromising too much video quality. sshot-4 - www.office.com/setup The second drop-down menu allows you to include or exclude any timings or narrations that you inserted on your PowerPoint presentation. Since the sample document has no timings or narrations, we will leave this as is. The "Use Recorded Timings and Narrations" will be unavailable if you don't have any of them in your presentation. sshot-5 - www.office.com/setup The time value box is where you can edit the amount of time that your slides will appear in the video. The default time is set at 5 seconds. For this tutorial, we will set it to 3 seconds. Lastly, you need

Part of the thrill of working for the Office Division is the opportunity to tackle thorny business issues on behalf of our customers while providing them with a road map for the future. That may be why an interesting article caught my attention this week. In it, the author examined some of the investments Microsoft is making in the unified communications space. While I didn't agree with all of the conclusions it contained, the article certainly underscored the interest in communications and collaboration and how to make people more productive. Communicating and collaborating with others is really at the heart of what we do every day. Whether at work or at home, people have the need to make meaningful connections with one another. Compounding that need are the realities of the world we live in where instant access to information is expected, friends and coworkers are scattered across geographies and many adults are juggling multiple mobile devices. At Microsoft, we believe technology isn't the problem to these complexities, it's the answer. We're committed to providing capabilities that help people make sense of it all and to do so in a way that is intuitive, barrier free and agnostic to the devices on which we rely. We're incredibly proud of the fact that our long term-term vision for communications and collaboration not only marries the best of the cloud and the desktop, it's a holistic approach that spans "from the living room to the boardroom" placing people at the center of everything we do. Our communication and collaboration vision comes to life utilizing client and cloud assets, including Lync, Skype, Yammer, Outlook and SharePoint. These tools are enabling enterprise social capabilities, HD video conferencing and document collaboration as part of a highly secured, reliable and extensible platform. At the risk of looking geeky, I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Lync and it's comforting to know I'm not alone. More than 90% of

This tutorial on using conditional formatting to highlight dates is brought to us by MVP Frédéric Le Guen, with special acknowledgment and thanks to Ken Puls for assistance with translation from French to English. Date functions in Excel make it is possible to perform date calculations, like addition or subtraction, resulting in automated or semi-automated worksheets. The NOW function, which calculates values based on the current date and time, is a great example of this. Taking this functionality a step further, when you mix date functions with conditional formatting, you can create spreadsheets that display date alerts automatically when a deadline is near or differentiates between types of days, like weekends and weekdays. THE BASICS OF CONDITIONAL FORMATTING FOR DATES To find conditional formatting for dates, go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cell Rules > A Date Occuring. www.office.com/setup You can select the following date options, ranging from yesterday to next month: www.office.com/setup These 10 date options generate rules based on the current date. If you need to create rules for other dates (e.g., greater than a month from the current date), you can create your own new rule. Below are step-by-step instructions for a few of my favorite conditional formats for dates. HIGHLIGHTING WEEKENDS When you design an automated calendar you don't need to color the weekends yourself. With the conditional formatting tool, you can automatically change the colors of weekends by basing the format on the WEEKDAY function. Assume that you have the date table-a calendar without conditional formatting: www.office.com/setup To change the color of the weekends, open the menu Conditional Formatting > New Rule www.office.com/setup In the next dialog box, select the menu Use a formula to determine which cell to format. www.office.com/setup In the text box Format values where this formula is true, enter the following WEEKDAY formula to determ

Remember the vintage game "Pull the Rug Out?" It is a board game where players stack different items on top of a rug. Eventually, one of the players tries to pull out the rug without tumbling the pieces stacked on top of it. Google's recent announcement that it is phasing out several additional services, including the highly popular Google Reader, reminded me of this game, as I recall that the stack most always toppled to the ground. Google introduced Google Reader, gradually built up its popularity, and then pulled the rug out with little warning, causing its customers to stumble. As one Google customer put it: "Google spends millions of wasted dollars on pet projects, then kills one of their best products on a whim." Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half. That's right-a whopping 70 services that have been shut down in just 18 months. Among the services Google will discontinue with little warning is Google Cloud Connect, introduced with a lot of fanfare just two years ago. Cloud Connect is a plug-in that enables Google users to share and edit Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. To continue collaborating with Microsoft Office, Google users have just four weeks to uninstall Cloud Connect and install Google Drive. Companies that can't get to it by April 30 will be out of luck, leaving them without a way to collaborate on Office documents used by millions of employees, partners, and customers. But of all the services Google is discontinuing this time, the one that's drawing the biggest backlash is Google Reader, a service used by hundreds of thousands of users to keep track of their favorite websites and blogs via RSS feeds. The news of Google Reader's shut down drew outrage from users, who put together a petition demanding that Google reinstate the service. "Our confidence in Google's other products - Gmail, YouTube, and yes, even Plus - requ

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Project 2016 has all the functionality and features you're used to, with some enhancements and the best new features from Office 2016. NOTE: The following feature updates are available to Project Online subscribers. They will first roll out to Office Insider participants. If you have a Project Online subscription, make sure you have the latest version of Office. MARCH 2017 TASK SUMMARY NAME FIELD With long lists of tasks, it can be difficult to know what a task is indented under in the overall project plan. The Task Summary Name field is a read-only field that shows the name of a task's summary task. Adding this field as a column in your Task view can help clarify your project's structure. To add this field, right-click the title of a column (to the right of where you want to add the field), select Insert Column, and then choose Task Summary Name from the drop-down list. Task Summary Name column - www.office.com/setup NOVEMBER 2016 TIMELINE BAR LABELS AND TASK PROGRESS Communicating project progress just got easier! Timeline bars can now be labeled, and task progress is shown right on the tasks themselves, making it simple to quickly illustrate your plan and the work in progress when sharing status. Timeline bars with labels and task progress - www.office.com/setup OCTOBER 2016 IN-APP FEEDBACK Have a comment or suggestion about Microsoft Office? We need your feedback to help us deliver great products. In Project, you can suggest new features, tell us what you like or what's not working by clicking File > Feedback. Click File > Feedback to offer comments or suggestions about Microsoft Project - www.office.com/setup SEPTEMBER 2015 MORE FLEXIBLE TIMELINES With Project 2016, not only can you leverage multiple timelines to illustrate different phases or categories of work, but you can also set the start and end dates for each timeline separately, to paint a clearer overall picture of the work involved. Formatted timeline in Project

Bella Engen is a Technical Writer on the SharePoint User Content Publishing team, focused on search-driven experiences. Cross-site publishing is a new publishing method in SharePoint Server 2013 that can help streamline the publishing process in your organization, and at the same time reduce costs associated with maintaining and updating your website. By combining cross-site publishing with SharePoint search features, you can reduce the number of pages needed to maintain your website, and gain flexibility in how content is presented to your customers. In a nutshell, cross-site publishing simplifies the authoring experience by separating the process of how content is authored from the process of how content is displayed. SharePoint search features enable you to add user-specific behavior to your website, such as displaying different content to different customer groups, or displaying recommendations based on user behavior. In a blog series on the SharePoint IT Pro blog, you can learn how you can use SharePoint Server 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. The blog posts describe the different functionalities that are involved when setting up such a site, and show you step-by-step how the features are configured. To demonstrate how it all comes together, data from a fictitious company is used. The blog posts use several screenshots and diagrams to explain everything from how the cross-site publishing feature works, to how you can use search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site. To give you an idea of what type of site this blog series describes, here are a few screenshots of the final website: www.office.com/setup Visit the "How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013" blog series overview page for the complete list of current and upcoming posts.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft today detailed the new features and improvements that it delivered to Office 365 users this month. Key among them are new Excel co-authoring capabilities, Microsoft Teams, and new OneNote inking and accessibility updates. "Office 365 provides the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration between individuals, teams and entire organizations," Microsoft corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer explains. Here's what's new in March. CO-AUTHORING IN EXCEL 2016 FOR WINDOWS Following similar functionality in Word and PowerPoint, Microsoft has enabled co-authoring capabilities in Excel for the Windows desktop (Excel 2016). (This feature is also available in Excel Online and Excel Mobile on Android, iOS, and Windows 10; Excel for Mac support is coming soon.) "This allows you to know who else is working with you in a spreadsheet, see where they're working and view changes automatically within seconds," Mr. Koenigsbauer says. Co-authoring in Excel 2016 for Windows is rolling out for Office 365 subscribers in Office Insider Fast, Microsoft says. Co-authoring in Excel for iOS is currently available for Office Insider. The feature is generally available in Excel Mobile for Android and Windows, and in Excel Online. AUTOSAVE Microsoft is working to expand the availability of AutoSave beyond mobile versions of Office: Office 365 subscribers in Office Insider Fast now have access to AutoSave in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on Windows desktop, for files stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business. "With AutoSave, you can stop worrying about hitting the Save button, whether you're working alone or with others," Mr. Koenigsbauer explains. MICROSOFT TEAMS Microsoft delivered its long-awaited Slack alternative, called Microsoft Teams, earlier this month to all Office 365 commercial customers. And last week, it shipped Microsoft Teams to all Office 365 Education subscribers as well. "We are thri

Today's post was written by Nick Portello, Network Manager, Steve Moore Chevrolet. Read more Office 365 customer stories here. Office 365 Customer Steve Moore Chevrolet_Nick PortelloWhen I joined Steve Moore Chevrolet as the sole IT staffer six months ago, the dealership was in dire need of new technology. Employees coped with aging PCs, an outdated POP3 email service, a poor mobility experience, data loss, and no collaboration tools. Then I heard about Microsoft Office 365, which gives you the latest version of Microsoft Office, plus a suite of cloud-based communication and collaboration tools that solved all our problems. Unlike Google Apps, the UI was familiar to our employees and Microsoft offered a flexible subscription-based payment option, which is ideal for our fluctuating workforce. Now that our documents are stored in Microsoft SharePoint Online and SkyDrive Pro, we have easy access to collaboration tools with robust security. I no longer worry about falling out of compliance with Chevrolet auditors, losing important financial data, or having to pay fines that could reach $250,000. I can also find data on-demand for Chevrolet auditors and use my mobile device to look up information, which saves about 40 percent of every day-I'm no longer running between my computer and the sales, service, and administration departments. I can focus on what I really need to do. Thanks to Office 365, we are all able to get on with our work! Learn more about Steve Moore Chevrolet and Office 365 by watching the video below and reading the case study.

We aim to make SkyDrive the place for all your documents, notes, photos, videos and other files. With the release of Windows 8 and Windows RT back in October, more and more people every day are using SkyDrive for their most important files through the SkyDrive app, as well as through SkyDrive integration in File Explorer. Of course, there are great SkyDrive experiences for Windows devices, but being the place for all your files means we invest a significant amount of effort ensuring you have a great experience across all the devices you want to use. Today, we're excited to release v3.0 of the SkyDrive app for iOS that includes improved photo features, an updated UI, and a number of other new features and enhancements. You can install or update the SkyDrive app for iOS now via iTunes. Here are the updates we've made to v3.0 of the SkyDrive app for iOS: Support for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini Updated app icons and user experience Works better with your photos: Download full resolution photos to your iPhone or iPad Control the size of photos you upload and download Photo metadata is retained when you upload to SkyDrive Opening and saving files to SkyDrive works better with other apps on your iOS devices Many other small changes, bug fixes and performance improvements

With Google Apps and Office 365 revolutionizing the way people work, you may feel that Microsoft Office is quickly becoming a dated product that will soon be packed away to the back of the closet. But with the 2016 version set to launch in autumn of this year, Microsoft is looking to change your mind. Now they're adapting their classic Office package for today's modern workforce. Here are four of the new features that are reinventing the way you look at your Office applications. CLOUD FOCUS FOR OUTLOOK ATTACHMENTS Microsoft knows that sharing attachments amongst co-workers and teams can be a hassle. With many collaborators still sharing documents and files the old fashioned way - attaching it to an email and then sending to others - it's easy for users to get confused and send an incorrect or outdated version. To solve this problem, Microsoft is gently nudging us to use the cloud. Now when you add an attachment to an email, you're now asked if you'd also like to share a link to a file on your OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint account. SHOWCASING EASY WAYS TO USE OFFICE BETTER If you're like most people, you probably aren't using Office to its full potential. And who can blame you? Between Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more, there are literally hundreds of features and tools you can use - if only you had the time to discover them all. To help you get the most out of Office, Microsoft has now added a Tell Me box in the top center of your program title bar. This tool gives you an easy way to get questions answered. For example, if you want to project your desktop screen to a second monitor or create a graph in Excel, simply type your question into the Tell Me box and Microsoft will find the answers that most closely fit your search criteria. SWAY Look out PowerPoint, here comes Sway - the new, hipper Office application that makes creating fluid, stylish presentations easy. With Sway, you can now gather content from various source

It's possible to save your Word 2016 document in the Adobe Acrobat document format, also known as a PDF file. This type of electronic publishing is secretly a form of printing your document. Obey these steps: Finish your document. Yes, that includes saving it one last time. Press Ctrl+P to summon the Print screen. Click the Printer button. A list of available printers appears. Choose Microsoft Print to PDF. Click the Print button. Nothing is printed on paper, but the document is "printed" to a new PDF file. That requires the use of the special Save Print Output As dialog box. Choose a location for the PDF file. Use the dialog box's controls to locate the proper folder. Type a filename. Click the Save button. The PDF file is created. The original document remains in the Word window, unchanged by the print-to-PDF operation. You need a copy of the Adobe Reader program to view PDF files. Don't worry: It's free. Word 2016 document files are considered a standard. Therefore, it's perfectly acceptable to send one of your document files as an email attachment or make it available for sharing on cloud storage.

www.office.com/setup Blogs: If you are still using Microsoft Office 2003, you should be aware that Official support has long ended. If you are using Office 2007, support is due to end in 2 short years. Microsoft Office 2016, the latest Windows-based version of the major technology company's application suite, is scheduled for a release sometime in spring, 2015. However, we already know quite a bit about the product, thanks to a preview and testing program that Microsoft has been running. Here are 6 details to look forward to, ahead of the product's mainstream release: 1. Better Security Microsoft Office 2016 will emphasize the value of better security parameters. In addition to a file-level encryption functionality, new data loss protection tools inside of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint will warn users when they attempt to save confidential files to unsafe locations. Microsoft Outlook will also be more secure, thanks to a multi-factor authentication feature. Similarly, the application suite will have stronger information rights management tools that let you limit what people can do with your documents or emails after you've shared access with them. For example, you can allow access to a certain document to expire after a set period of time, and prevent it from being forwarded. These tools will also stop people from copying and pasting information out of Microsoft Office 2016 applications. 2. Business Intelligence Features Microsoft Excel lives up to its name in Microsoft Office 2016. The latest version of this application features a built-in business intelligence tool called Power Query. This tool can dramatically change the way that you approach your data. Using it, you can quickly combine your own numbers with figures from public databases like Data.gov and Microsoft Azure Marketplace. After doing this, the application has another tool that lets you create detailed visualizations of the combined data. The data analysis tool