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www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft Forms is a new part of Office 365 Education that allows teachers and students to quickly and easily create custom quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, registrations and more. When you create a quiz or form, you can invite others to respond to it using any web browser, even on mobile devices. As results are submitted, you can use built-in analytics to evaluate responses. Form data, such as quiz results, can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis or grading. WHAT YOU'LL NEED An Office 365 Education subscription. If you're not sure you have this, please contact your IT administrator to verify. An organizational or school ID account for yourself with permissions to use Microsoft Forms. Screenshot showing monitor with form open - www.office.com/setup Create forms in minutes Screenshot showing three people sharing a form - www.office.com/setup Send forms to anyone Screenshot of a monitor displaying charts for a form - www.office.com/setup See results in real time Why can't I log in to Microsoft Forms? Microsoft Forms is available only to Office 365 Education subscribers using a school or organization ID account. GET STARTED QUICKLY Clipboard Bring together teachers and students. Get more done! Create a form or quiz with questions, define settings, share your form, and check the results-in a few easy steps. Step 1: Sign in and create a new form or quiz Step 2: Adjust settings for your form or quiz Step 3: Send your form or quiz to others and collect responses Step 4: Check your form results or quiz results Are you an admin? Learn about security and privacy, Microsoft Forms data storage, and how to turn on or turn off Microsoft Forms in your organization. ADD PICTURES AND VIDEOS TO YOUR FORM OR QUIZ People Enhance your quizzes and forms with pictures and videos. Want to add a logo to your form or display pictures or videos next to quiz questions? You can do all of these tasks quickly in Microsoft Forms. Add a picture

Does Microsoft Word 2016 regularly detect words that you commonly use as misspelled words? You can change this by adding custom words to the dictionary. OPTION 1 - ADD WHILE WRITING Type the word in your document and right-click on it and select "Add to Dictionary". Add to Word dictionary - www.office.com/setup OPTION 2 - ADD FROM SETTINGS Expand the Office Quick Access Toolbar and select "More Commands…". Word 2016 More Comments option - www.office.com/setup Select "Proofing" in the left pane, then click the "Custom Dictionaries…" button. Word 2016 Custome Dictionaries button - www.office.com/setup Here you can add or remove dictionaries. Usually you just need to use one dictionary. To add a word to the dictionary, select "Edit Word List…" . Word 2016 Edit Word List button - www.office.com/setup Type the word you wish to add to the dictionary and click "Add". Word 2016 Add word to dictionary - www.office.com/setup Select "OK" then "OK" again when you are done adding words.Now your word will not be detected by Word as a misspelling. Note: This option is also available in other Office applications such as Outlook, Excel, Publisher, etc. FAQ Why is my "Add to Dictionary" option grayed out? This seems like a bug in the software. Try going to File > Options > Proofing > Customer Dictionaries. Then select the "Dictionary language". Then remove the checkbox next to the dictionary item, then check it again. These steps seem to toggle something in the software that makes the "Add to Dictionary" option available again.

In order to stay competitive in today's world, teams need to connect and share with each other more than ever before. On March 28th, we had the pleasure of hosting Rob Koplowitz from Forrester Research and Walton Smith from Booz Allen Hamilton in a live webinar where they discussed why organizations are turning to enterprise social and how they are using it to help their teams work more openly and efficiently. Rob discussed how communication is changing, and how we're accessing and interacting with information in new ways-incredibly, 66% of information workers in North America and Europe already work remotely.* The shift to cloud-based software and platforms is definitely contributing to some of these changes. The old way of building software involved engineers, months of coming up with specs, running Beta programs, and debugging. The time from idea to ship could take years. So the introduction of the cloud-and social-to the Enterprise is enabling companies to innovate and move to market faster than ever before. The cloud provides anytime, anywhere access which is essential to our increasingly mobile work environments; today employees can quickly and easily access a range of business systems, information and expertise from anywhere in the world. Our shift to cloud-based platforms and the introduction of working openly with social are changing the way teams collaborate. Take, for example, Booz Allen Hamilton, a leading provider of management and technology consulting services. The company has over 26,000 employees worldwide, with over 71% of their employees working on-site with customers, which often limits their access to company resources.** But in order to provide the best service to their clients, consultants need to be able to quickly and easily access information and expertise. Booz Allen recently integrated Yammer as a social layer across business tools because the cloud-based platform enables consultants world-wide to collaborate virtually. When o

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: While you can always enter data directly into database tables, you might find it easier to use forms. Forms ensure you're entering the right data in the right location and format. This can help keep your database accurate and consistent. This lesson will address the benefits of using forms in a database. You will review examples of different forms and form components. Finally, you will learn how to use forms to enter new records and view and edit existing ones. Throughout this tutorial, we will be using a sample database. If you would like to follow along, you'll need to download our Access 2016 sample database. You will need to have Access 2016 installed on your computer in order to open the example. Watch the video below to learn more about working with forms in Access. WHY USE FORMS? Many of us fill out forms so often that we hardly notice when we're asked to use them. Forms are so popular because they're useful to the person asking for the information and to the person providing it. They are a way of requiring information in a specific format, which means the person filling out the form knows exactly which information to include and where to put it. Illustration of a paper form - www.office.com/setup This is just as true of forms in Access. When you enter information into a form in Access, the data goes exactly where it's supposed to go: into one or more related tables. While entering data into simple tables is fairly straightforward, data entry becomes more complicated as you start populating tables with records from elsewhere in the database. For instance, the orders table in a bakery's database might link to information on customers, products, and prices drawn from related tables. For example, in the Orders Table below the Customer ID field is linked to the Customers table. The Customer ID field links to the Customers table - www.office.com/setup In fact, in order to see the entire

While we are lucky enough to work with extremely innovative clients that are eager to embrace the latest technology, we always advise them not to adopt the latest version of software until after the kinks are worked out. For a consumer it's not a big deal to be test driving new features and experimenting with the latest version. For a business user, if there's a bit of a learning curve, buggy features or errors that make an application crash, it can be a huge detriment to productivity. That's why we take a lot of time testing out new applications and operating systems before we encourage our clients to adopt them. You may have read that Microsoft recently unveiled Office 2016. We spent some time with it and have some mixed feedback for our business users. Here's the good, bad and the ugly surrounding the Office 2016 suite: The Good: Built to make business better. Word is probably our favorite when it comes to the new suite of products. While there has been minimal change to formatting and structure - the overall design has definitely gotten a facelift. We're all about function, though and when it comes to function we see definite improvements. Word has many more templates. This allows businesses to refine their documents and be more professional without having to go online and download templates to use inside Word. There are also some pretty awesome co-authoring features that we wrote about in this blog. Attachments in Outlook reference recent documents. This is a great feature since it's available on any device that you use Office on. You can easily attach documents in e-mails in Outlook or reference them in an e-mail on your phone. This is really valuable for mobile users or users that work from more than one machine. (Which, lets face is, 90% of the workforce these days does.) OneDrive is also attempting to make its way into the life of business users by making sharing documents, collaborating on documents and authoring documents across devices a l

www.office.com/setup Blogs: I've been installing Office 2013 on a lot of computers lately and I've ran into quite a few problems along the way. From annoying messages like "Sorry we ran into a problem" and "Something went wrong" to slow downloads, hanging at certain percentages during the install, it's been typical Microsoft problems all along the way. If you've been trying to install Office 2013 on Windows 8 or Windows 7 and you're running into issues, I'm going to try and give you as many possible solutions as I could find. If you run into a different issue not mentioned here, feel free to post a comment and let us know. It's also worth noting that you can't install Office 2013 on Windows Vista or Windows XP, it's just not possible. You'll get an error message like: This is not a valid Win32 application or We are sorry, you couldn't install your Office product because you don't have a modern Windows operating system. You need Microsoft windows 7 (or newer) to install this product or The procedure entry point K32GetProcessImageFileNameW could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNERL32.dll Now let's talk about some of the problems that can occur when installing Office 2013 on Windows 7 and Windows 8. FIX "SOMETHING WENT WRONG" OFFICE 2013 You might get this error if a first installation stalled and you ended up starting a second installation over the first one. You might also get this error if the computer restarted for some reason before the installation was finished. In this case, you should go to the Control Panel, click on Microsoft Office 2013 or Microsoft Office 365 and click on Change. Office 2013 change - www.office.com/setup Blogs Depending on your version of Office installed, you should either see an option called Repair or Online Repair. If you have Office 365, you'll see Online Repair and then the Repair option. Office 2013 repair - www.office.com/setup Blogs If, for some reason, this fails or

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Evernote and OneNote are two of our favorite tools, but both have changed substantially since we last compared these two apps-in some ways, not for the best. Here's where these two stand today. www.office.com/setup LIFEHACKER FACEOFF: ONENOTE VS. EVERNOTE Now that Microsoft OneNote is free for Mac and Windows, the price and cross-platform barriers to…Read more WHAT'S NEW IN EVERNOTE In the last year, Evernote introduced a new pricing plan, redesigned its webapp, and added new features for its Android and iOS apps. THE FREE PLAN LOSES A FEATURE, BUT NOW THERE'S A MORE AFFORDABLE PAID PLAN Let's talk price first with Evernote, since it's the biggest change in the last year. The free plan no longer lets you email notes to Evernote, something most users enjoyed and used often prior to that change. Although you can get around this limitation with an IFTTT recipe, you won't get the full flexibility of Evernote's email-to-notes feature, such as specifying your destination notebook in the email subject line. So that's a bummer. On the positive side, however, Evernote introduced a new, more affordable paid plan called Evernote Plus. For $25 a year, you get offline notebooks for Evernote's mobile apps and the ability to lock the app on your phone with a PIN. Both of these used to require Evernote's Premium plan, which used to cost $45 a year. Finally, Evernote's Premium plan now costs $50 a year. But in return for those five extra bucks, you get larger upload limits: 10GB a month, instead of the previous 4GB data cap. With Evernote Premium, you can search attachments, scan business cards, view previous note versions, annotate PDFs, and use the new note presentation mode. EVERNOTE'S USER INTERFACE KEEPS EVOLVING www.office.com/setup Last year, Evernote took its redesigned, minimalist web client out of beta. Though slicker and easier on the eyes, the makeover also made the webapp less functional. You can't order

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Having come around to the idea that it needed different versions of Office for different kind of users, Microsoft introduced lightweight versions of Word, Excel, Power Point and OneNote that are neither as pricey or as feature laden as the main versions included in Office. iPad users were the first to get their hands on this new take on Office. With Windows 10, the free Microsoft Office Mobile apps have arrived for some Windows users. 10 Things to Love About Windows 10 (7) - www.office.com/setup Blogs Read: Windows 10 Review - A Love Affair Here's how to get that free Microsoft Office in Windows 10, and what you need to know about it why it's possible for some to take advantage and not possible for others. HOW TO GET FREE MICROSOFT OFFICE IN WINDOWS 10: WHAT IS IT? Microsoft Office is wildly successful. Everyday millions of users all open it to get work done. Millions of documents are written in Microsoft Word. Millions of budgets and sales breakdowns are created in Microsoft Excel. Everyone has created a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation at some point in their life. Screenshot (236) - www.office.com/setup Blogs Windows and Microsoft Office are synonymous. Because the two are often used together and both made by Microsoft, many assume that one comes included with the other. That's never been true. Windows device makers often included shortcuts to trials for Microsoft Office with new PCs. Some even bundled it with their PCs, passing the cost on to buyers. Microsoft Office costs $149 if purchased outright or $6.99 a month through Microsoft's Office 365 subscription service. Office Mobile is what Microsoft collectively calls the free Microsoft Office apps that are now available. Word Mobile lets Windows 10 users view documents. Excel Mobile focuses on spreadsheets. PowerPoint Mobile lets users look at presentations. Outlook is separated into to apps, Outlook Calendar and Outlook Mail. Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar are a

www.office.com/setup Blogs: The shrouded veil of secrecy has been lifted from the latest edition of Microsoft Office. Excitement for Office 2016 is still lagging behind the Windows 10 enthusiasm camp, but following the July 29 release of Windows 10, attention will return to the world's most popular productivity suite.When Does Windows 10 Come Out, How Can You Get It & What Happens to the Technical Preview? When Does Windows 10 Come Out, How Can You Get It & What Happens to the Technical Preview?Windows 10 is coming soon. Still confused about how the upgrade will work and wondering about the timeline? We have some answers, although more questions remain.READ MORE Office 2016, like Windows 10, has been re-designed within a revised Microsoft ethos. Office 2016 has been built from the ground-up with mobile and cloud users in mind, slotting in with the ever expanding fleet of Microsoft productivity applications. Office is, in general, a different set of tools from days gone by. We aren't confined to the five-or-so core products, and we can expand the functionality of the Office ecosystem using a massive range of add-ins and templates. Office 2016 logo - www.office.com/setup I'm using VirtualBox to preview Office 2016. Microsoft strongly suggested uninstalling Office 2013, which isn't currently viable due to work commitments. Using a virtual machine, however is a great way to explore different Office products alongside each other, without having to uninstall your current suite. I've also had a look at Office 2016 on Windows 10 Build 10130. Verdict: good times.How To Use VirtualBox: User's Guide How To Use VirtualBox: User's GuideLearn to use VirtualBox. Get virtual computers up and running inside your computer, without having to buy any new hardware.READ MORE Anyway, enough of that. Let's look at Office 2016. NEW OVERVIEW Much akin to the extended and inclusive testing phase of Windows 10, the Office 2016 preview has now accumulated over 1 million users,

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Microsoft announced two new tools, Researcher and Editor, for Word 2016 today that introduce better research integration and writing assistance. Word 2016 is the newest version of the popular word editing software that is available to Office 365 users and customers who purchased a standalone copy of Office 2016. The update is available today to all Office 365 subscribers who are using Word 2016 on the Windows desktop according to Microsoft. The easiest way to find out whether you have it or not is to open Word 2016 on the Windows desktop and check whether the new "Researcher" option is available under References when you edit a document. RESEARCHER word 2016 researcher - www.office.com/setup Researcher is a new tool that you may use to find references directly from within Word 2016. The feature uses Bing's Knowledge Graph for that and displays data in a sidebar in the Word 2016 when enabled. You find the new option under References > Researcher. Researcher is a new service in Word that helps you find and incorporate reliable sources and content for your paper in fewer steps. Right within your Word document you can explore material related to your topic and add it-and its properly-formatted citation-in one click. Researcher uses the Bing Knowledge Graph to pull in the appropriate content from the web and provide structured, safe and credible information. You may use the new tool to add quotes and "properly formatted citation" to documents. While this may not be suitable for science-grade documents, it may do for many other types of documents. EDITOR word 2016 editor - www.office.com/setup Editor is touted as a new digital writing assistant that assists you with proofing and editing services. The initial release flags unclear phrases, redundancy or complex words, and makes recommendations by displaying alternatives to you. The service uses machine learning and natural language processing for that, and will improve over time

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Even though PowerPoint presentations are designed to be viewed on a computer, there may be times when you want to print them. You can even print custom versions of a presentation, which can be especially helpful when presenting your slide show. The Print pane makes it easy to preview and print your presentation. Optional: Download our practice presentation. Watch the video below to learn more about printing in PowerPoint. PRINT LAYOUTS PowerPoint offers several layouts to choose from when printing a presentation. The layout you choose will mostly depend on why you're printing the slide show. There are four types of print layouts. Full Page Slides: This prints a full page for each slide in your presentation. This layout is most useful if you need to review or edit a printed copy of your presentation. preview of a full page slide printout - www.office.com/setup Notes Pages: This prints each slide, along with any speaker notes for the slide. If you've included a lot of notes for each slide, you could keep a printed copy of the notes with you while presenting. previewing the notes pages layout - www.office.com/setup Outline: This prints an overall outline of the slide show. You could use this to review the organization of your slide show and prepare to deliver your presentation. preview of an outline printout Handouts: This prints thumbnail versions of each slide, with optional space for notes. This layout is especially useful if you want to give your audience a physical copy of the presentation. The optional space allows them to take notes on each slide. preview of a handouts printout - www.office.com/setup TO ACCESS THE PRINT PANE: Select the File tab. Backstage view will appear. selecting the File tab - www.office.com/setup Select Print. The Print pane will appear. clicking Print in the Backstage view - www.office.com/setup Click the buttons in the interactive below to learn more about using

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Today marks general availability of Microsoft Flow and PowerApps, which enable people to automate workflows and quickly build custom apps that suit their specific needs. Earlier this year, we announced integration of SharePoint with Microsoft Flow, enabling you to create and launch flows directly from a SharePoint list. We also announced that native integration of PowerApps and SharePoint would drive rich new experiences to continue reinventing business processes with modern document libraries and modern lists in SharePoint. We know that tight integration is essential to unlocking productivity gains for the digital workplace. Accessing data from mobile devices was a first step. Bringing business processes to the same site for team documents and data is next. That's why SharePoint is a great home for your enterprise business applications. As we recognize today's milestones for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, you can also look ahead to even deeper integration of these business tools as part of SharePoint, as we showcased at Ignite in September. UPCOMING INTEGRATION WITH SHAREPOINT PowerApps will be fully integrated into the SharePoint web experience. PowerApps provides a great mobile experience, and now that experience is connected to the data stored in SharePoint lists. Soon you'll be able to integrate PowerApps as the default in-browser experience for any SharePoint modern list. sharepoint-welcomes-powerapps-and-microsoft-flow-1 - www.office.com/setup PowerApps embedded in a SharePoint list. This means: You'll be able to launch PowerApps directly from the SharePoint mobile app. Modern document libraries will be made available as a data source for PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. For Microsoft Flow, you'll be able to run any flow on demand for a specific document or list item, in addition to waiting for an automated trigger to fire. Using the data gateway, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow will work with on-premises data in SQL and

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Databases in Access are composed of four objects: tables, queries, forms, and reports. Together, these objects allow you to enter, store, analyze, and compile data however you want. In this lesson, you will learn about each of the four objects and come to understand how they interact with each other to create a fully functional relational database. Watch the video below to learn more about objects in Access. TABLES By this point, you should already understand that a database is a collection of data organized into many connected lists. In Access, all data is stored in tables, which puts tables at the heart of any database. You might already know that tables are organized into vertical columns and horizontal rows. Rows and columns in an Access table - www.office.com/setup In Access, rows and columns are referred to as records and fields. A field is more than just a column; it's a way of organizing information by the type of data it is. Every piece of information within a field is of the same type. For example, every entry in a field called First Name would be a name, and every entry in field called Street Address would be an address. Fields and field names - www.office.com/setup Likewise, a record is more than just a row; it's a unit of information. Every cell in a given row is part of that row's record. A record - www.office.com/setup Notice how each record spans several fields. Even though the information in each record is organized into fields, it belongs with the other information in that record. See the number at the left of each row? It's the ID number that identifies each record. The ID number for a record refers to every piece of information contained on that row. Record ID numbers - www.office.com/setup Tables are good for storing closely related information. Let's say you own a bakery and have a database that includes a table with your customers' names and information, lik

www.office.com/setup Blogs: While you can always enter data directly into database tables, you might find it easier to use forms. Forms ensure you're entering the right data in the right location and format. This can help keep your database accurate and consistent. This lesson will address the benefits of using forms in a database. You will review examples of different forms and form components. Finally, you will learn how to use forms to enter new records and view and edit existing ones. Throughout this tutorial, we will be using a sample database. If you would like to follow along, you'll need to download our Access 2016 sample database. You will need to have Access 2016 installed on your computer in order to open the example. Watch the video below to learn more about working with forms in Access. WHY USE FORMS? Many of us fill out forms so often that we hardly notice when we're asked to use them. Forms are so popular because they're useful to the person asking for the information and to the person providing it. They are a way of requiring information in a specific format, which means the person filling out the form knows exactly which information to include and where to put it. Illustration of a paper form - www.office.com/setup This is just as true of forms in Access. When you enter information into a form in Access, the data goes exactly where it's supposed to go: into one or more related tables. While entering data into simple tables is fairly straightforward, data entry becomes more complicated as you start populating tables with records from elsewhere in the database. For instance, the orders table in a bakery's database might link to information on customers, products, and prices drawn from related tables. For example, in the Orders Table below the Customer ID field is linked to the Customers table. The Customer ID field links to the Customers table - www.office.com/setup In fact, in order to see the entire order you would also have to look at the

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Even though PowerPoint presentations are designed to be viewed on a computer, there may be times when you want to print them. You can even print custom versions of a presentation, which can be especially helpful when presenting your slide show. The Print pane makes it easy to preview and print your presentation. Optional: Download our practice presentation. Watch the video below to learn more about printing in PowerPoint. PRINT LAYOUTS PowerPoint offers several layouts to choose from when printing a presentation. The layout you choose will mostly depend on why you're printing the slide show. There are four types of print layouts. Full Page Slides: This prints a full page for each slide in your presentation. This layout is most useful if you need to review or edit a printed copy of your presentation. preview of a full page slide printout - www.office.com/setup Notes Pages: This prints each slide, along with any speaker notes for the slide. If you've included a lot of notes for each slide, you could keep a printed copy of the notes with you while presenting. previewing the notes pages layout - www.office.com/setup Outline: This prints an overall outline of the slide show. You could use this to review the organization of your slide show and prepare to deliver your presentation. preview of an outline printout Handouts: This prints thumbnail versions of each slide, with optional space for notes. This layout is especially useful if you want to give your audience a physical copy of the presentation. The optional space allows them to take notes on each slide. preview of a handouts printout - www.office.com/setup TO ACCESS THE PRINT PANE: Select the File tab. Backstage view will appear. selecting the File tab - www.office.com/setup Select Print. The Print pane will appear. clicking Print in the Backstage view - www.office.com/setup Click the buttons in the interactive below to learn more about using

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to save $12 million over four years. The City of Chicago anticipates saving $1.3 million over the same length of time. And the State of Minnesota expects to save at least $800,000. Governments of all sizes are finding ways to reduce IT costs while improving efficiency. What's their secret weapon? With public sector budgets shrinking in many places around the globe, smart governments are making taxpayer dollars stretch further by migrating from an on-premise environment to Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud. By moving to Office 365, governments can reduce both their capital and operating costs. And by saving money, they can make taxpayer dollars go further during a time when budgets are tight and there's often less revenue to work with. So how exactly can Office 365 save governments money? First, governments can cut back on the capital cost of investing in more computer servers. Second, they can reduce the administrative cost of having to maintain an IT environment. Third, they can lower their energy costs by reducing the size of their data centers. And they can also reduce costs using the many tools within Office 365 that improve employee efficiency. According to a study conducted by Forrester Consulting, Office 365 delivers an ROI of 321 percent with a payback period of two months for a composite midsize organization. That translates into huge value for public sector organizations! Among the government agencies that anticipating money saved by implementing Office 365 is the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency expects to save $12 million over four years by moving to the cloud and Office 365. Some of those savings will be in energy costs as the agency relies on Microsoft to operate its data centers. "The EPA will continue to lead the pack on environmental stewardship, and moving an IT environment to the cloud is a natural part of that," says Greg Myers, vice president of Microsoft Federal. "There

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.

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

April's Customer of the Month is Robert Aichele, Senior Manager, Store Communications at Jamba Juice. I've been at Jamba since 2009 managing internal communication, primarily store and field communication, with a hand in some broader projects connecting our strategic vision with the managers in the field. Our Yammer network debuted in 2011, catching on with a small group and then expanding quickly to include our entire Support Center. It was so popular we extended it to our company-owned store managers later that year, and it plateaued happily there for several months as an interesting tool to share ideas and problem solve operational issues when we needed to hear diverse perspectives quickly. I'm a firm believer in story telling as a means to engage employees with the "why" behind what we do as a company - and sometimes what we stop doing - and in the spring of 2012 we had a big story to tell. Our first National Hiring Day was happening in Jamba stores across the country as we prepared to hire thousands of new employees and ramp up for our busy summer season. We'd organized the event through traditional channels: our intranet, email, weekly task management publications, and pre-event conference calls. And we had big plans to collect photographs, interview hiring managers, and write up a recap to share the success stories with everyone after the fact. On the big day I logged into Yammer and got a big surprise. The event was unfolding in glorious detail right as it happened with photos, comments, personal stories, and genuine pride and enthusiasm for the Jamba brand just pouring out. We never wrote that recap.

What is Microsoft Visio used for? Diagrams. That's what Microsoft Visio does, and it does it better than any other app I've seen yet. From flow charts to floor plans, there isn't much it can't handle. Now, being honest, I didn't know much about Visio until recently. But that changed when I decided to take it for a test drive - right out of the latest Microsoft Office. Visio Templates Office 2013 - www.office.com/setup Microsoft Visio can be used to create simple or complicated diagrams. It offers a wide variety of built-in shapes, objects, and stencils to work with. You can also make your own shapes and import them if you're willing to do all that extra work. The driving idea behind Visio is to make diagramming as easy as possible for the user. I think Visio is on the right track for that! Note: Click images below to open them at Full Size. The Visio 2013 welcome screen features a dozen different templates to get you started. Each template equips you with the appropriate menu and objects already open and ready for use. Even more templates can be found in specific categories within the application, or from Visio's online download page. visio welcome screen - www.office.com/setup Visio's primary clientele have been Enterprise users at the corporate level. If you think about it, it's not too often that the home user needs to write up professional diagrams. Usually, a paper and pen will suffice because a home user's diagram isn't being sent out to an entire department. That's why Visio has always been considered a program for "serious" diagrams. But it doesn't have to be. table chart with live data - www.office.com/setup Visio can be used to create 3D map diagrams, though the built-in tools for this are limited. It works well for simple maps that you might print on a brochure or campus directory. visio map - www.office.com/setup Another thing Visio can do is pull in live information from an external source, such as an Excel shee