As a faculty member at UH, you have access to Office 365. What is Office 365? It’s basically a suite of Microsoft applications and cloud services that you can use for free, including the most up to date version of Office apps, like Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But it also includes things that extend the basic Office apps, like OneDrive, Forms, OneNote, Planner, Stream, Sway and more.
To get you started using Office 365, we’ve created a set of tutorials that will help you get up and running in no time:
- How to Login to Office 365
- How to Upload Files or Folders to OneDrive
- How to Share Files or Folders with Others in OneDrive
- How to Share OneDrive Files in Canvas
What to love about Office 365?
- You get 1 terabyte of cloud storage for free with Office 365. (That’s cheaper than the $99/year you’d spend on Dropbox and the $120/year on Google Drive for the same storage, and without all the Microsoft apps.)
- You can securely share documents to other UH faculty, staff, and students while limiting access to everyone else. This makes collaboration with colleagues and students easy to manage.
- (My favorite!) If you use Microsoft files heavily as course materials, you can save them to OneDrive and share them with students. Now, whenever you update your PowerPoint, Word Document or Excel file, your students will always have the latest and greatest, without having to re-share the file with them or update the link.
- You can access your files anywhere, with any device.
- Finally, on every Microsoft file you save to OneDrive, updates are automatically saved AND OneDrive keeps a version history of the document. So if you want to go back to a previous version and see what changes have been made, no problem.
By now you should be convinced that Office 365 is at least worth an initial glance. In the coming months, we’ll be posting more in depth articles about how you can leverage Office 365 in your courses and research to manage your workflows more efficiently.
