Office tools, also known as Microsoft Office or Microsoft 365, comprise a wide range of applications that help you transform routine tasks into more flexible and efficient processes, enabling you to create, edit, organise, automate and share documents in a more secure and streamlined manner.
Office tools also allow us to work flexibly from any location, with the highest levels of security and a seamless experience for teams. They enable the creation of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email management, databases, forms, notes, automations, video management… and thus, countless features to meet the needs of any professional.
What are their main applications and features?
Office 365 boasts countless applications that assist us in day-to-day management. As executive secretaries, we have evolved, becoming great allies of these tools, increasing our productivity and becoming more efficient in those more manual tasks. Thanks to the multiple functionalities these tools offer, we have become more proactive, efficient and autonomous in our daily tasks.
For executive secretaries, who in many cases manage three or four senior executives with their respective calendars and, in some cases, their inboxes too, it is important to be proficient in using Outlook and to make the most of all the features it offers.
Having a clear and organised view of shared folders and inboxes is essential to remain operational at all times and ensure that no email or scheduling conflict of real importance slips through the net.
Creating folders and setting up rules that allow you to view all unread emails helps you prioritise them appropriately in each case.
The option to create rules in Outlook allows you to automatically sort your emails into folders, so that you can prioritise what is truly important in a more organised and structured way.
Rules also allow you to schedule the sending of your emails, giving you a second chance to review all the details of your message before it leaves your outbox and reaches the recipient. This process is one of the most widely used by professionals.
In certain environments, it is also possible to retrieve emails that have been sent with a typo. In the Sent Items folder, select your email, highlight it, choose the option to retrieve the email, update the information and resend the message correctly.
The Outlook tool also allows us to flag and categorise emails so that you can create tasks and continuously track pending issues that are important and have not yet been resolved.
Outlook also has a section for storing contacts and sharing them with your team members or your manager, so that if someone updates them, the data is synchronised for everyone involved.
For the Secretariat team, Outlook is one of the Office 365 tools we use most intensively, for organising information and managing our daily tasks, both in calendars and in shared inboxes and mailboxes.
Another essential tool in our day-to-day work is Teams. It allows us to communicate with all colleagues across the company via instant messaging chats and manage calls directly within the tool. It offers a wide range of features, such as creating teams for collaborative work.
Spaces are created in SharePoint to share files without needing to send emails, with private or public channels, and the ability for several people to work on documents simultaneously, updating and saving data in real time.
Teams also allows you to create workflows that improve communication between people without needing to use Outlook. Furthermore, it offers the option to add backgrounds to calls and create a more comfortable atmosphere for these communications.
For secretarial roles, the OneNote tool is also very important; it provides a space to create day-to-day notes and meeting notes, and offers a virtual notebook where you can update the most relevant notes. If you work in a team or with another person, it is highly recommended for updating information, as the data will always be synchronised for all team members. It is a highly recommended tool for teamwork and for keeping information aligned.
Forms is another tool widely used by teams, as it allows you to conduct simple, convenient, visual and highly effective surveys with management or company staff. This feature is easy to use and allows you to conduct surveys in great detail and in a very creative way.
In our role as executive secretaries, it is very important to have at least a basic understanding of the Power Automate tool, which allows us to automate a wide range of tasks through its workflows. One of the most commonly used workflows is the integration with Teams chats to receive notifications when an email arrives from your manager or shared inboxes, thus preventing the loss of relevant information. It also allows you to file documents directly into folders without having to do so manually, amongst many other tasks.
With tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, work becomes much easier with Office 365, as it enables collaborative working, activates auto-save and reduces the risk of data loss.
Document archiving is another of the most important tools; in this case, OneDrive is essential. All the information archived in this space can be shared via links, reducing the volume of emails and improving data protection against potential risks.
What is the relationship with the development of new technologies in general and with AI in particular?
AI enables us to evolve and realise the full potential of the tools offered by Office 365 and our workplace. At Telefónica, many of us have a version of Copilot integrated into the tools, which offers us a wide range of uses.
Copilot functions as a personal assistant, responding to queries efficiently and quickly. It enables users to summarise lengthy documents, provide ideas for preparing presentations, generate images and translate texts into different languages. It also helps to proofread texts, using appropriate expressions, thereby bringing clarity and coherence to the messages we send. It is an ally in enhancing our work and improving the quality of our tasks within the Office tools.
If you have a more advanced Copilot licence, the possibilities increase significantly. It allows, for example, a quick scan of your inbox to identify emails requiring priority action, without the need to read every message. It also helps detect scheduling conflicts between different calendars and generate automation workflows that connect one tool to another, simplifying day-to-day management.
The evolution of all these Office tools, combined with AI, allows us to focus on more strategic and leadership-related tasks, reducing the manual workload and increasing staff productivity.
