Chances are that you are already very familiar with the original Microsoft Office selection of tools being Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. The reason we are going over this is because as Office grew and adapted to the current world so too did the tools within. Office updated all the tools I just listed and even added a few called OneNote and OneDrive.

In this lecture, however, I want to go over some of the specifics of how Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have changed in the years to showcase exactly what makes them such powerful collaboration tools as well as a bit of OneNote and Outlook to show where they fall into the Office suite. Now, as I mentioned in the previous lecture, a file saved in either OneDrive or SharePoint is available for something called Co-Authoring.

Co-Authoring is a feature that works across Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote that allows multiple people to be working on the same document in real-time. In order to use this feature all one has to do is share that document with another person and once they open that document they will be able to collaborate on it in real-time. Let’s take a look quickly at what co-authoring looks like in each tool.

Here we are in Microsoft Word. As you can see here we have a nice brand new document all about video production. You might notice on my screen that I have a small little colored cursor separate from my own. This actually indicates another user is in this document viewing the same document at the same time as me. If I hover over it and I can see that this cursor belongs to a guest user. Had I given someone specific access with their email like I showcased in the previous lecture, it would actually show their name here. 

To verify this is indeed someone else’s cursor, I’m going to go ahead and open up multiple versions of the same document as different users. As you can see, each document has 2 different cursors each with their own color indicating the other user. If I click around in one document you can see it also moves around in the other document. And watch what happens when I type.

This is an example of real-time co-authoring that works across all of the classic office tools being Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Now it is important to note that this is a feature that is enabled through OneDrive and SharePoint. Any file shard from one of those drives allows this co-authoring and also carries over to wherever the documents can be accessed like Microsoft Teams.

We will cover this more once we get the lecture on teams.