Category: Microsoft

If you’re working from home and not using MS Teams to co-ordinate your efforts, you’re possibly not being as productive as you could be.

In this article learn more about Microsoft Teams and how this super-app could save you and your team not just time, but also probably a few headaches too!

1. Improve your communication via one interface

Manage all your work and communication from just one interface. The true power of MS Teams comes from the fact that you can bundle written communication, calls, video conferencing, file storage and file sharing all in just one program! What an amazing way to improve productivity.

Start by encouraging all your colleagues to place key project work in specific project folders in Teams. Not only can everyone access the files, but the corresponding project chat is also found in the same place, making it easy to refer to later. No more wasting time searching through multiple replied and forwarded emails to find what you want!

2. Collaborate more with your colleagues

Use the meeting feature of MS Teams to collaborate effectively by sharing your screen, which allows you to edit and update documents in real-time with multiple contributors. This increases transparency and reduces miscommunication mistakes, as people can talk through their rationale and methodology in real-time as they make the changes. If someone has any questions the control of the shared screen can be given to the questioner, and they can show their ideas and updates on the actual document.

3. Make your virtual meetings super productive

Location does not need to be an issue to hold productive meetings. No matter where everyone is based, all team members can attend and the video element (via webcam) makes it feel as if they’re in the room with you!

MS Teams has some useful video call features such as recording the meeting, sharing your screen and live captions. Even better, the meeting video is automatically stored in Microsoft Stream. This means it can easily be shared with those who couldn’t make the meeting, saving the time and pain of writing minutes.

4. Access what you need over multiple platforms and devices

It is incredibly easy to link MS Teams to other apps. Imagine a synchronous hub for all your work, connected between not just different apps but also all your different devices. Sounds like heaven right!

Connect MS Teams instantly to other Office apps such as SharePoint, Forms and Excel. It’s also possible to connect to third party apps such as Hootsuite, SurveyMonkey and hundreds of others. This means for example, if you’re working on a survey, you can sync that into MS Teams and everyone in your team can have access to it via the MS Teams portal. Efficiency at its finest!

Summary

Working from home may be a shift from your normal work routine. However, that shift does not need to impact your productivity if you use MS Teams.

Learn more in our range of Office 365 training courses, from MS Teams to Sharepoint to OneNote.

Why use What if?

Have you ever wanted to quickly demonstrate how your data changes in different scenarios? The What if parameter in Power BI is a powerful tool that allows you to do just this, by dynamically transforming your data.

For example, maybe you want to know how much your profits will increase if you raise your price by either 2%, 4% or 6%? Or show the effect of spending more money on marketing? If you know the correlation between price, marketing and profit, you can quickly compare these scenarios and ensure you make the right choice when making critical business decisions.

How do I use What If?

The scenario:

Imagine you want to visualise how the sales total will change if you sell more units. 5%, 10%, or 15% more.

Step 1: Use a matrix to visualise the sales total for each product. Click New Parameter on the Modelling tab, which will open the What-if parameter dialog box. Type a name and data type, in this example the data type will be Decimal number. Type a minimum, maximum and the incremental changes, in this example 0.05 (5%) and click OK.

This will insert a new table, called a parameter table, in your Power BI file and a slicer on your report page.

If you have a look at the new table in Data view, you will see the values.

And if you look at the report page you will see the slicer. Try dragging the handle across and see how the value will change from 0% to 15%.

Step 2: Create a measure you can use to visualise the percentage changes of the quantity.

Start by multiplying the price with the quantity, and then multiply with 1 plus the selected value from the increase quantity table (the parameter table).

Increase quantity =

SUMX (

    tblsales,

    [Quantity] * [Price] * ( 1 + ‘increase quantity'[increase quantity Value] )

)

By adding the measure to the matrix you can now see how it will change the total sales if the quantity increase with 5%, 10%, or 15% – simply drag the slicer across.

Conclusion

Here you have learnt to create a quick and easy What If parameter for dynamically transforming your data in Power BI. Read Part 2 to learn how to personalise your parameter further to give even more powerful insights, or check out our Power BI training page to find out how you can learn even more skills in this amazing reporting tool!