The importance of content creation nowadays significantly impacts digital marketing, branding, and communication in the modern era. Composition, revision, and publication efficiency are also vital for writing, marketing, or business ownership professionals.
Microsoft Office 365 offers a complete set of powerful tools to streamline your publishing process.
Let’s explore the following Office 365 productivity hacks for increasing the speed of writing, editing, and publishing without compromising on superior quality standards.
Built-In AI Writing Assistant of MS Word
Office 365’s Microsoft Editor is an AI-powered tool that works with Microsoft Word and helps create clear, succinct, and easy to understand text. Here are some tips to improve its features:
- Grammarly and Spell-Check: Automatically identifies and fixes grammatical, typing, and punctuation errors.
- Suggestions for clarity: Suggestions are given to improve sentence structure and readability.
- Plagiarism Check: It looks for any content-copying that could reduce the originality of your document.
- Rewrite Suggestions: It suggests alternative sentence constructions for clarity and flow.
You may use the Read Aloud tool to hear the content and discover difficult wording or repeated phrases.
Leverage Word Templates for Faster Writing
Pre-designed Word templates expedite the process of creating content rather than starting from scratch every time. The Microsoft 365 tools offer a variety of templates for blog posts, company reports, and other documents. Ebooks and proposals are also included.
Open Microsoft Word, choose File, then the New option to access templates. Then, you may look for and modify the templates you like. With this hack, formatting, and organization are no longer necessary, so you can focus only on the content.
Utilize OneNote for Seamless Content Organization
When creating content, OneNote is a powerful digital notebook that helps you brainstorm, research, and gather ideas. A few must-have components may be:
- Record your ideas instantaneously using Quick Notes- anything from text to audio to images.
- Categorize your notes nicely for easy accessibility with the use of a tagging system.
- With search functionality, you can find your past notes and references faster.
Syncing on the cloud allows you to pull up notes from any device that hinders your productivity.
Use OneNote’s audio recording capability to transcribe your thoughts and convert them into text later.
Improve Collaboration with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams’ real-time editing feature, which lets many users simultaneously change a document, facilitates teamwork.
Teams makes it easy to interchange and save documents by integrating with file sharing. Its built-in chat conference capabilities let you discuss changes without leaving the workspace.
Rather than exchanging emails, you and other employees can work on the same document in real time using Microsoft Word’s Co-Authoring feature.
To avoid an overflowing inbox, you can provide feedback by adding comments directly in Words or Teams. You can also utilize @mentions to notify certain team members of modifications or recommendations.
Office 365 Productivity Hacks: Automate Repetitive Tasks with Power Automate
Power Automate, part of Office 365, lets you automatically handle repetitive tasks such as document conversion to PDF format, content publishing schedule, and approval requests.
Start with Power Automate. From there, either design a procedure or choose an existing one. Connect Power Automate to Outlook, SharePoint, and Word. At last, let automation take place.
Use Excel for Content Planning and Tracking
Excel is excellent for more than simply crunching numbers; it also helps with content development and monitoring progress. Essential applications are the Editorial Calendar (for planning publication schedules with dates, subjects, and due dates), the Keyword Research Tracker (for organizing SEO keywords for content blogging), and the Content Performance Analytics (for tracking engagement). Use Excel’s conditional formatting to color-code projects and deadlines according to priority.
Speed Up Proofreading with Track Changes
Rather than editing manually, utilize Track Changes in Word for effective proofreading and revision.
This function emphasizes edits, simplifies reviews, enables collaborators to leave comments directly on the document via the comments feature, and offers version history to restore past versions if necessary.
To enable track changes, open Word, click Review, and then Track Changes. Make edits and share with others.
Publish Directly from Word to a Blog
Can content be published directly from Word to a blog? Office 365 integrates with platforms such as WordPress and Sharepoint to enable the smooth publishing.
Word makes it simple to publish directly to your blog. Open the software, click File>Share>Post to Blog, add your blog credentials, and then hit Publish.
This solution keeps formatting and efficiency intact by eliminating copying and pasting.
Use Dictation for Faster Content Creation
Typing can be a time-consuming activity. Nevertheless, Microsoft 365’s dictation feature simplifies the process of converting spoken words into text.
Once you turn dictation on, you can begin talking into Word, which will interpret it as text. Open OneNote or Word, navigate to the home tab and choose Dictate. It is the way to take if you need to brainstorm or write extended pieces of writing in a hurry.
Use SharePoint for Efficient Content Management
SharePoint lets companies arrange and save important data in a centralized, readily accessible space. One benefit is workflow automation, which streamlines the approval process.
Version control—which saves many versions of a document—stores; access control—which establishes editing and reading permissions—stores; and workflow automation—stores
Bonus Tips for Maximum Efficiency
Keyboard Shortcuts: Keyboard shortcuts like ctrl + v ( to paste) and ctrl + h (to search and replace) save time.
Dark Mode: Turn on dark mode in Word and Outlook to reduce eye strain and increase comfort during more extended work periods.
Outlook’s Scheduling Assistant: This feature helps you properly plan meetings and content deadlines and prevent scheduling problems.
MyAnalytics: Monitors working patterns and increases output by spotting time wasting activities.
Office 365 Productivity Hacks: Final Thoughts
Office 365 is a productive arsenal for content developers, writers, and companies interested in increasing productivity. You can write, edit, and publish content quicker and more effectively using AI-based editing tools, cloud collaboration features, and automated workflows.
By adopting these Office 365 productivity hacks today, you can make your content development process more efficient, precise, and productive!
