Office 365 - the Confusing Cloud
March 27, 2017
Office 365 - the Confusing Cloud
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Microsoft Office (Installed)
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Office 365
We use it for the majority of our email/presentations/document generation needs. We also use PowerPoint for presentations. I have used Microsoft Office for two decades. What has been new for us with Office 365 are the Onedrive and Sharepoint cloud storage and team work management services. We use the programs on our desktops (Mac and Windows) as well as the accompanying apps on our mobile devices. We mostly use installed, desktop versions, but will occasionally use the web versions when not in the office.
- Word's track changes feature is a must. I use it all the time to send edits back to our media person so that she can see exactly what my edits are.
- Excel is very robust in what it can do, but is also very user friendly and, for the most part, intuitive. I use it for budgeting and financial reports.
- The cloud based fully synced email/contacts in Outlook Exchange server keeps ALL of my devices on the same page, which is a must.
- Their cloud setup is confusing. I just want a web based shared drive for my office mates so we can all access certain files remotely. I think we could have done that with onedrive for business, but right when I switched to Office365, they got rid of OneDrive for business and replaced with with SharePoint and then, maybe "Delve." I am starting to understand SharePoint, but it is not easy to share with people on a different domain. I have no idea what "Delve" is. This all seems way over-engineered for what I want/need.
- Permissions on OneDrive are not intuitive. I have two accounts, one for work and one that is personal, and although they are linked, I will often get an error message that says I can't save a file I'm working on to my OneDrive because I don't have permission - but I am the author of the document! this requires me to sign out and sign in again. Frustrating.
- Slow indexing of emails on mobile devices. This may seem like nitpicking, but when I am away from my desk, on my phone with no wifi - which is often - and I need to look up an email from last week, the query will return emails from three or four years ago with those search terms but take forever to find the one from yesterday. There should be a priority given to recent emails in indexing or queries. Maybe there's a setting for this, but even if so, it should already be set to that for a default. It can be very exasperating when you're in a hurry and you can't find that email that you KNOW you flagged five days earlier to respond to.
- With the included cloud storage, we ended up paying 60% less per person and getting 10 times the storage.
Google Docs, for example, is similar to MS Word. I have used it occasionally, and it is impressive. It really caught my attention when I logged in to help my son's 8th grade class on a writing project. From my office computer, I could see him and all of his classmates simultaneously working on a document from their respective computers. But, again, my familiarity with MS Office, it's standard usage in and compatibility across the workplace and an assumption (nothing to back it up, admittedly) that it is more secure kept me with Office 365.