Workspace Team Blog

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bri — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:37:00 GMT

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Tech challenges of a home business: How Office Live can help

MonteEnbysk1 -MSFT — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:03:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post continues a short series about using Office Live Workspace to help you work from home.)

When you work from home, for your own business or someone else's, you wear many hats. One of them, for most people, is that of a chief information officer. Or IT department head. Or computer tech specialist.

Or let's be more realistic. You don't have a fancy IT title or your own staff. You are simply your own geek, unless you have spouse that does your technical support for you, or a neighbor with lots of free time.

Christopher Elliott, a writer and producer who has run his own home business for almost two decades, understands this well, and that is why he offers tips and advice in his Office Live Small Business article, "Top 6 technology challenges for home businesses."

Check out his challenge No. 4 in this article: Inadequate data backup.

It is most definitely a challenge — losing your data in an accident or a disaster could wipe out your entire business. Yes, many people who work at home don’t back up their data or do any catastrophe planning regarding their data. They are risking everything by not investing some time and attention to this important task.

Office Live Workspace provides up to 5 gigabytes of storage space for free. What that means is that most home businesses can back up all of their files and documents — at least the vast majority of them, if not all of them — to a password-protected online workspace, accessible via a Web browser. Trust me, 5 gigabytes is a lot of storage space; it equals more than 5,000 books of text, which means many thousands of documents.

With Office Live Workspace, you can avoid using Flash drives for backing up files; Flash drives can easily get lost or misplaced. Not true with Office Live Workspace.

For more information on using Office Live Workspace to back up your files online, see this previous blog post. See also a video from a user who has peace of mind now that she knows her files are stored away safely but are accessible whenever she needs them.

Monte Enbysk

How to stay in touch with your health when school consumes your life

Anthony Colon — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:41:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Anthony Colon continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

Most incoming freshmen don't seem to realize the toll that being a student can have on your body. With many long nights, countless energy drinks, and zillions of slices of pizza, one can find himself or herself getting into unhealthy routines.

As many students eventually realize, eating, exercising, and getting adequate sleep will help you perform much better than pulling those all-nighters with nothing but coffee in your stomach.

Using Office Live Workspace with Microsoft Access has helped me and a lot of others along the way.

Active in high school, I soon saw that college drastically reduced my physical activity and hindered my healthy eating habits. I turned to Office Live Workspace to help. But I realized I needed some support, from a team of people in which I could be proactive with. That is where Office Live Workspace came in.

Using Microsoft Access, I found a simple Nutrition template that was already made, which consisted of exercise and eating logs, weight trackers, and even a place for recipes.

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Being able to upload and share this information has become an invaluable asset to my friends and me. We can track each other’s progress, schedule times when it is convenient to work out, and even upload healthy recipes that others viewing the workspace can look at and even add to.

Try it yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

Anthony Colon

Senior, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Make a good home office great with Office Live Workspace

MonteEnbysk1 -MSFT — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 01:19:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post continues a short series about using Office Live Workspace to help you work from home.)

For more than 25 years, writer Jeff Wuorio has operated a home-based business in southern Maine. Wuorio always does considerable research on his articles about running a small business, personal finance, and other topics he enjoys. But when he writes about a subject such as working from home, you know he has a lot of firsthand experience to back up his words.

In his article for Office Live Small Business titled, "How to make a good home office great," Wuorio discusses the importance of adequate lighting, efficient use of space, keeping clutter to a minimum, personalizing your office with plaques, awards, and other mementos that are upbeat and motivational, and, not surprisingly, making good use of technology.

But he doesn't just generalize on making good use of technology. He gets into specifics; see his bullet point in tip No. 5, "Consider digital storage."

By using an online repository such as Office Live Workspace, Wuorio suggests, you have the equivalent of an off-site storage facility to keep your documents, reports, and anything else you need to save. But this repository is free and easily accessed wherever you are via the Internet.

"It's not only convenient, but also is an added measure of safety if your home office is damaged by fire or other mishap," he notes in the article.

In Office Live Workspace, you have 5 gigabytes of storage space per workspace. If necessary, you can create multiple workspaces. That should be more than enough to store your business records, family schedules — anything you need to store related to business and personal use. And you can share parts of your workspace with whomever you want —and control what they see.

You can also collaborate online on speeches, spreadsheets, articles, and reports, without having to e-mail versions back and forth. (See this page for more info on using Office Live Workspace at home.)

Digital storage such as Office Live Workspace enables to you to use your home office space more efficiently and keep clutter to a minimum — two other tips from Wuorio. See the rest of his tips for making a good home office great.

Monte Enbysk

How Office Live Workspace is helping our group project stand out

Adam Lazarus — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:33:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Adam Lazarus continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

Hello again. Just over a month ago, I wrote a post for this blog explaining how I started using Office Live Workspace for a class project. I'm writing again to fill you in on how it's going and why Office Live Workspace is really helping our group outperform the rest.

As I explained in my previous post, Office Live Workspace is helping our group in many different ways. The group project for which we are using it is designing a theoretical book-selling system using standard system analysis and design techniques. The project has three phases, each with its own due date. My group just completed Phase 2 and is just beginning the final phase. Even though we are two-thirds through the project, we're still finding new ways to use our workspace to keep us working more efficiently.

With the project stretching over an entire semester, I noticed the workspace was beginning to get cluttered and filled with lots of documents and files. It became harder for anyone to find what they needed. A neat feature we started using was to create folders in our workspace. That allows us to keep all of the documents more organized and separate everything into its own category.

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Another part of Office Live Workspace that has come in handy is the ability to see different versions of each document. The project has strict deadlines, and there have been times when more than one person is working simultaneously on the same document. Being able to create multiple versions of documents has allowed us work more efficiently and collaborate better with each other.

A time when I noticed the Versions feature of Office Live Workspace really helping our group was when a team member was having difficulty creating diagrams in Microsoft Visio. He posted a comment on the workspace, asking for help. Another team member then created a new version of the document and showed him the correct way to create a diagram.

Our group has benefited greatly from using Office Live Workspace for this project. It gave us such a huge step ahead that a few other groups in the class have now also begun using it to manage their projects. The next phase for us is a presentation. My group is planning on using our workspace, along with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 in the new Office 2010 beta, to create the presentation.

I'm hoping it turns out just as well as everything else has so far with the project, thanks to Office Live Workspace.

Adam Lazarus

Junior, University of Tampa

How to synchronize your Outlook contact list with Office Live Workspace

Jimmy.Rivas — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:06:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Jimmy Rivas continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

Contact lists are among the most important items in a professional career. Many professionals depend on Microsoft Outlook to control their contact list. This is a great choice because it is a great way to have e-mails, addresses, and phone numbers organized. On the down side, a computer can crash at any time.

That is why I am writing about a tool to help you lessen of this risk. Office Live Workspace gives you the opportunity to save your Outlook contact list online. This gives you the opportunity to secure those phone numbers and the chance to access them from any computer any time.

Here are three steps to synchronize your Outlook contact list with Office Live Workspace:

1. Create a new contact list in Office Live Workspace.

· On the Office Live Workspace main page, click on the New drop-down menu.

· On the drop down menu, select the Contact List option.

· Give your preferred name to this contact list.

· Click on the “SAVE” option after the contact list name is given.

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2. Synchronize your Office Live Workspace contact list with your Outlook contact list.

· Click the Connect to Outlook option on the Office Live Workspace main page.

· Click Allow on the computer prompt to allow the Office Live Workspace to access your Outlook program.

· Click Yes on the computer prompt to allow the Web site to connect with Outlook.

· Verify that a new contact list is added to your Outlook with the same name as the one in Office Live Workspace.

3. Add contacts from the original Outlook contact list to your Office Live Workspace contact list.

· On the original Outlook contact list, click CTRL + A to select all contacts, and drag and drop the contacts to the Office Live Workspace contact list in Outlook.

· Verify that the Office Live Workspace Web page is updating all the contacts added to its contact list.

Jimmy Rivas

Junior, University of New Haven

Panic attack ends with a smile! Thank you, Office Live Workspace

Robert Firth — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:00:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Robert Firth continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

I love Office Live Workspace. It's so useful. We’re currently using it in my software engineering class to collaborate on a group project. But let me tell you a little story about that.

I had created a Project Workspace for the assignment, and added my team members as Editors. We worked for weeks creating documentation for the software project we’re working on. No problems.

One night, I accidentally clicked Delete on our project workspace. The shared workspace disappeared. What had I done? How was I going to break it to my group members that I just deleted several weeks’ worth of work?

I didn't have to, it turns out. After the initial panic, I was able to restore the deleted files and re-share the workspace. I didn’t know that you could restore a deleted workspace. You can, and it works.

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What did I learn from the experience?

1. Don’t panic. The deleted file or workspace is still there.

2. Once you restore the file from the Deleted Items workspace, you will find that all comments and shares are deleted. You will have to re-invite your teammates to edit the workspace.

3. Deleted files and workspaces persist for 30 days, unless also deleted from the Deleted Items folder. If you don’t restore them during the 30-day window, they will be permanently deleted.

Robert Firth
Senior, Louisiana State University

Brief Community site downtime planned Sunday for server upgrade

Sue at Microsoft — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:40:00 GMT

Hi everyone. I wanted to provide you with advance notice that we are planning for a brief downtime on the Office Live Workspace and Office Live Small Business Community sites on Sunday, Nov. 15.

The downtime will last only 30 minutes, and is scheduled to happen between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time. The downtime is occurring in order to perform hardware upgrades to the servers for our Community sites.

The downtime of the Community sites will NOT impact your Office Live Workspace or Office Live Small Business accounts or services.

On behalf of the Office Live team, we appreciate your patience.

Sue Sonday

Share notes easily with Windows 7 and Office Live Workspace

Kevin Messenhimer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:26:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Kevin Messenhimer continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

Having a Windows 7-powered laptop with Office Live Workspace on it is an excellent combo for college. I've been using two products for a couple of weeks now and my experience has been three words: simple, easy, and fast.

Last week, one of my classmates couldn't make it to class and he needed me to take notes for him. Luckily, I currently own a Tablet PC with Windows 7; so taking these notes on a newly released, very efficient, battery-saving, awesome operating system made this task a whole lot easier. So I went to class, digitally wrote my notes in Microsoft OneNote 2007 (with the help of the new features for multi-touch in Windows 7), and when class was over, I simply just saved my document and uploaded it on the fly to Office Live Workspace.

Office Live Workspace makes it easy to share notes and documents by having your own workspace where you can upload documents for revision and editing. You may have different workspaces for different projects and share them individually with team members, co-workers, or just friends.

That night, I shared my workspace in Office Live Workspace with my friend, and five minutes later, he e-mailed me to say thanks for all my hard work. Hard work? Not anymore with Office Live Workspace and Windows 7 combined.

Kevin Messenhimer
Junior, University of Texas at San Antonio

How to stay motivated when working from home

MonteEnbysk1 -MSFT — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:12:00 GMT

(Editor's note: Today, we begin a short series of posts about using Office Live Workspace to help you work from home.)

In an article for Office Live Small Business, writer Christopher Elliott offers what he calls the "secrets to staying motivated when you work from home."

Elliott, who lives in Orlando, Fla., has worked from a home office since 1994. He'll tell you firsthand the trials and tribulations of doing so, including the times when you don't feel like getting dressed for work, when kids interrupt whatever progress you’ve made, when you let e-mail and phone calls dominate your day, and when you just don't feel like working, period.

In his article, he offers ways to work around all of these distractions and motivational hurdles.

One aspect of working at home that he does not address, however, is the problems that occur when you don't have an efficient way to work with other people on documents and files.

Maybe it's because you don't have access to another business's network, but you need to work directly with someone there on a speech, article, PowerPoint presentation, or even a spreadsheet. Maybe you have to resort to e-mail to share edits with several other people, and the process gets out of hand because you suddenly have a multitude of versions.

Office Live Workspace offers you a central location for documents, presentations, pictures, and other files that you to store and share. Don't have access to a company's network? Have your colleagues there add items to share or to collaborate on to your workspace.

Need multiple people to read, edit, or give feedback to a document? Don't waste your time and others' doing it via e-mail. Use a workspace to record all edits to one central document in one location. With the Office Live Update, you can save files to your workspace directly from Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

What's more, you can access your password-protected workspace from virtually anywhere there's an Internet browser. So you can use different computers, even a public PC, to send and retrieve files from your workspace. Which means, when you need to get work done, you’re not just stuck at home on your desktop PC. You can work away at a Starbucks or any Internet café.

Need any more motivation to have your own workspace? How about this: It's free. Check it out.

Monte Enbysk

Students: Use Office Live Workspace to share course work, old tests

Jessica Brazelton — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:08:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Jessica Brazelton continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

A good tip in college is to get to know the upperclassmen. When you're taking difficult classes and need help, the best source is going to someone who has taken the course before.

These students probably have old homework and tests from that class that could be very useful to you when trying to understand the course.

Office Live Workspace is a good tool to use when sharing these types of documents. All you have to do is:

1. Create a new workspace.

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2. Upload documents.

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3. Add the people that you want to share this space with.

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Now you can easily share documents. You can even make comments on documents as you collaborate with others in trying to understand that course. This same concept can be used for group projects and student organizations.

Jessica Brazelton

Senior, Tuskegee University

Why I don't worry about forgetting my USB Flash Drive anymore

CharlesTimko — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:57:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Charles Timko continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

I discovered Office Live Workspace about two years ago. Ever since finding out about it, I have used it from class projects to personal papers and research.

I always thought it was a neat little tool that saved me from having to carry around my USB Flash Drive, because no matter where I go on the Purdue University campus, I have a wireless connection.

At the time, I had been using another online storage service, but it just didn't have all the neat features that Office Live Workspace has.

One of the first things that caught my eye about Office Live Workspace was its ability to link into the Microsoft Office suite. The Office Live Add-in tool made it easy to save and open from the online workspace.

Another feature of Office Live Workspace introduced that I rather appreciate today is the "versioning control." Sometimes I get carried away with saving a file, but it always comes to a point while writing a paper that I realized that I have strayed so far off-topic that the new text is pointless and the text that I deleted was a better choice than what I have now.

So I was able to go onto Office Live Workspace and recover the version that I made that isn't off-topic.

Since having an Office Live Workspace, I have never missed a presentation or assignment, because I have never had to worry about forgetting my USB drive, which happened to me frequently in high school. If only I'd had it then.

Charles Timko

Junior, Purdue University

How students use Office Live Workspace and Office to learn — and to choose a school mascot!

JimJin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:07:00 GMT

The teachers at Keith Valley Middle School in Horsham, Pa., are serious about having their students become technology savvy. So they have included learning Microsoft Office, Office Live Workspace, and Bing in their lesson plans for the current school year.

But they also want their students to have fun with technology — and their school to have a mascot. So teachers Diane Heitzenrater, Stacy Rotchford, and Valerie Fasy decided to have some 400 sixth-graders they teach use Office Live Workspace and Office to collaborate on a new mascot for the school.

It was a hit! The Keith Valley Middle School students set up a workgroup on Office Live Workspace to nominate, illustrate, promote, and debate possible mascot names in recent weeks. They used Microsoft Word to brainstorm ideas and write letters of support for their choices to the school principal. They used Microsoft PowerPoint to create charts and graphics and make their presentations.

Once the mascot ideas were nominated, promoted, and presented to all of the students, they voted on their choice for a mascot.

Last week, in front of hundreds of students, teachers, and parents, the new mascot for Keith Valley Middle School was formally announced by Principal Jonathan Kircher: the Keith Valley Kats!

The winning entry was created and submitted by student Anna Hill.

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"The students were excited about designing the new mascot and sharing their ideas while actively engaging in learning new software and interacting with new students," said teacher Valerie Fasy.

Now that the school has a mascot, the students will continue using Office Live Workspace, Office, and Bing in their classrooms. Bing has been instrumental in helping the students learn how to use a search engine and to find things on the Internet.

Want to learn more about how these Keith Valley Middle School students are aided by Microsoft technologies in their studies and in choosing a school mascot? See this video.

Here's another video to check out: The Keith Valley students, and some of their teachers, dance to "Bing goes the Internet," the winning song by amateur songwriter Jonathan Mann in Bing's Jingle Contest held earlier this year.

Jim Jin

My online lifesaver comes to the rescue again

Daniel Gilmore — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:09:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Daniel Gilmore continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

What is worse than going through all the exams at the end of your senior year in college? Graduating and entering the real world, of course!

Thankfully, the transition doesn't have to be that overwhelming. One of the first things that I am doing my last semester is to make a checklist of all the things I must take care of. My checklist is nothing fancy; just a simple bulleted list of items in Word 2007 of things that I will need to look into.

· Prepare my last final report … check!

· Register for my diploma … check!

· Knowing what I am going to do with the rest of my life … I think I might need to get back to you on that one!

One thing I have found is that with all of the documents people are sending me to fill out or take care of, everything kind of becomes one big jumble. I have started to move a lot of the things people send me online to Office Live Workspace. (There is even a convenient plug-in for Word 2007 to save directly to Office Live Workspace!)

First, I create different workspaces for each function, college, career, housing, and budget. Then, I can organize everything into the different workspaces. Next, since I do not always remember everything, I take down notes and add little reminders to myself to make sure to investigate something further.

One of the nice features of Office Live Workspace is that all my documents are available anywhere in the world, as long as the computer has an Internet connection and a browser. This definitely helps for those times when something just pops into my head, and I just can't afford to forget it.

Next, if someone I know needs access to a document, the built-in document-sharing tools make giving out access quick and easy.

Thank goodness, most things are electronic and online these days. I could not imagine carrying around 100 pounds of all the forms and documents that are required just to graduate from college!

Daniel Gilmore

Senior, University of Michigan

With a large file upload capacity, Office Live Workspace lets you work faster and do more

Brian Vo — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:22:00 GMT

(Editor's note: This post from Brian Vo continues an ongoing series of posts from college students offering advice on how to use Office Live Workspace and other Microsoft software and services for their classroom work.)

As time goes on, my classes only seem to get more difficult. Essays, research papers, and projects aren't as simple as they used to be. And you can't put together an assignment by using one individual file.

With Office Live Workspace you can upload a batch of files all at one time, all in one window without having to open > select > upload/wait, open > select > upload/wait, open > …

Oh, and it doesn't just stop there. The assignments we have now require providing files that aren't just full of words. They must also include pictures, diagrams, charts, and other types of illustrations. This can easily make individual files surpass 500 kilobytes easily.

Students are able to utilize Office Live Workspace's upload capacity, which is 25 megabytes per file! That is twice as much as a well-known competitor.

With up to 5 gigabytes available, that's 5,242,880 kilobytes, or 5,120 megabytes, of storage. Office Live Workspace offers more than enough space for you to upload about 5,000 files without having to click one by one.

Brian Vo

Senior, University of California, Davis