Microsoft Office training – does your project team need it?

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Microsoft Office is the most popular suite of office productivity tools used by organisations today.

Available as desktop applications, or web applications, Microsoft Office provides a full suite of programs to meet any need, including those of project teams.

In this article we will explore what Microsoft Office provides, and then investigate whether training in Microsoft Office is recommended for your project management team members.

What is Microsoft Office?Instructor-led

Microsoft Office is the best-known business office productivity suite of tools. It is available as a software as a service (SaaS) as part of the Office 365 suite, or as a standalone suite of applications for desktop (either Windows or Mac), and mobile.ITIL Foundation (Version 5) course

There are three different suites of Microsoft Office which are useful for project teams:

• Microsoft Office 365 Business Basic1,499 +vat
• Microsoft Office 365 Business Standard
• Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium.See all dates

These three suites come with web versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Standard and Premium suites come with desktop and web versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and desktop versions of Access and Publisher.

For project managers needing to maximise collaboration and productivity amongst their teams, the good thing to know about the three Office 365 Business suites is that they all come bundled with Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, OneDrive and Exchange. As such, all suites are perfect for project team members.Self-paced

Microsoft Office aids collaboration on projects ITIL Foundation (version 5) self-paced online

The most important thing for project team members on any project is they must be able to collaborate and share information easily. Team members who have attended a PRINCE2 course699 +vat or have taken any of the other Studying for ITIL v4 certificationproject management coursesYou can study for ITIL 4 certification by either: will have learned the importance of good communication to achieve success on projects.attending a classroom course; or,

Good communication is a typical soft skill that can be taught on a attending a virtual class via live online training; or,project management courseby self-studying using an , but good communication requires robust tools to aid collaboration between team members.ITIL Foundation online course

This is where Microsoft Office comes in. Microsoft Sharepoint enables .project managersITIL v4 certification levels to set up sites where all project files and folders can be located in one place. Sharepoint even comes with rudimentary configuration management capabilities to enforce checking-out and checking-in of shared files. This helps project teams perform version control over project assets.To gain

The OneDrive desktop application also comes with each of the four Office 365 suites. OneDrive is a key productivity tool for project team members because it enables the automatic syncing of files and folders which have been shared on the project team’s Sharepoint site. There’s no need to download files and folders manually because OneDrive does all of this automatically.ITIL v4 certification

The third key productivity tool for project teams is Microsoft Teams. This is a video conferencing and meeting tool. It enables remote project team members to meet, share video, audio, and files during real-time., you must pass tests at the following levels:

Microsoft Office training – is it needed?1. ITIL Foundation certification

The answer to this question depends upon your team members. It is common for many people to already have experience of Microsoft Office applications, or their Google equivalents. However, most people only have experience of using the most common Office tools – Outlook, Excel, Word and Powerpoint. It’s quite possible that project team members don’t have experience of some of the most important Office tools – i.e. Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive.ITIL Foundation

This is where training can come in handy. Microsoft provides a lot of free training resources on its website in its core Office products. If your project has large numbers of people who require training, in-house training can be a quick and cost-effective way to get your team members up to speed. is the first step to climb on the ITIL certification path. The syllabus for ITIL v4 Foundation consists of:

If it’s just a matter of a few project team members needing some training, then a good starting point is to review the training materials which Microsoft provides for free.ITIL practices;

We have included a short summary of the training available in the core Microsoft Office products below, so click on each link to see more.The guiding principles of ITIL 4;

• Microsoft Excel trainingKey concepts from Lean,
• Microsoft Word trainingAgile
• Microsoft Powerpoint training and
• Microsoft Outlook trainingDevOps
• Microsoft Access training;
• Microsoft Sharepoint trainingThe four dimensions of service management;
• Microsoft Project trainingThe concept of value with customers and stakeholders in the form of products and services.
• Microsoft Visio trainingAfter passing the