Most people use about 10% of what Microsoft 365 can do. That’s not a criticism — there’s just so much in there that nobody has time to dig around. So you stick with what you know, and the rest of it sits there quietly being useful to someone else.
The thing is, a few small tricks can shave real time off your week. Not “watch a 90-minute training video” tricks. Just the kind of small habits that make you go “oh, I wish I’d known that two years ago.”
Here are eight of them.
Stop emailing attachments. Share a link instead.
When you attach a Word doc to an email, you’ve created a problem. Now there are two versions of that file — yours and theirs. They edit one, you edit the other, and a week later nobody knows which one is current.
Instead, save the file to OneDrive or SharePoint, then in Outlook click Attach File → Browse Web Locations → OneDrive, pick the file, and choose Share link instead of attaching a copy.
Now everyone’s working on the same file. You can see their edits live. There’s only ever one version of the truth. And bonus — your inbox stops getting clogged with 20MB attachments.
What “local” actually means in IT support
Plenty of providers claim to be “Melbourne-based” but their nearest engineer is in Dandenong, two hours away in peak traffic. So when you’re evaluating IT support, here’s what to ask:
Where are your engineers actually based? Not the head office — the people who’d come on-site. If you’re in Greensborough, an engineer based in the northern suburbs can be at your door in well under an hour. One based in Frankston, Werribee, or interstate is a different story entirely.
What’s your typical on-site response time? A good local provider should commit to specific timeframes. “Within an hour” for emergencies in their service area is a reasonable benchmark. Vague answers like “as soon as we can” are usually a sign they’re stretched thin or covering too wide an area.
Have you worked with businesses in my industry, in my area? Knowledge of local context matters. A medical practice in Heidelberg has different IT needs than a manufacturer in Thomastown — and a provider who’s worked with similar businesses nearby will already know the common pain points, the right vendors, and the local quirks (like which suburbs have decent NBN and which still struggle).
Use @mentions in Teams (and emails) to actually get a response
If you want a specific person to read something in a Teams chat or channel, type @ and then their name. They get a notification that says “you were mentioned” — which cuts through the noise of general chat messages they might otherwise scroll past.
This works in Outlook too. Type @ in the body of an email and pick a person, and their email auto-fills into the To field. They get a flag in their inbox showing they were specifically mentioned. Useful when you’re emailing a group but need one person to actually do something.
The Search bar is a teleporter
The search bar at the top of every Microsoft 365 app (Word, Outlook, Excel, Teams) is more powerful than people think. It’s not just for finding files.
In Outlook, type a person’s name to instantly pull up every email they’ve ever sent you. Type a project name to find every email and attachment related to it. In Word or Excel, type “convert to PDF” or “remove duplicates” and it’ll run the command without you having to hunt through menus.
If you ever find yourself clicking through three menus to do something, type the action into the search bar instead. Nine times out of ten, it’s faster.
Schedule emails to send later
You’re working back at 9pm and finally get through your inbox. Don’t send those emails now — your colleagues will see them and think you expect a reply at 9pm (or worse, that they should also be working at 9pm).
In Outlook, instead of clicking Send, click the little dropdown arrow next to it and choose Schedule Send. Pick tomorrow at 8:30am. The email goes out then, you look organised, and nobody’s weekend gets ruined by a “quick question” landing on Saturday morning.
This is also handy for sending birthday emails, follow-ups, or reminders to yourself at a specific time.
Dictate instead of typing for long messages
Hidden in plain sight on the Word and Outlook ribbon: the Dictate button (a little microphone). Click it and start talking. The accuracy these days is genuinely good — Australian accents and all.
It’s especially handy when you’re drafting longer emails or documents. Talk through your ideas first, then go back and tidy up. Most people speak about three times faster than they type, so even with editing, you come out ahead.
You can also say punctuation out loud — “comma,” “full stop,” “new paragraph” — and it’ll insert them.
Use Teams’ “Saved messages” so you stop losing things
Someone drops a useful link, document, or piece of information in a Teams chat, and three weeks later you can’t find it. We’ve all been there.
Hover over any message in Teams and click the three dots (…) → Save this message. Later, click your profile picture in the top-right corner and select Saved to see everything you’ve bookmarked. It’s basically a “to-read-later” pile that doesn’t clutter your inbox.
Turn on Focused Inbox or Focus Time
If your inbox is chaotic, Focused Inbox (in Outlook settings) splits it into two views — Focused for stuff that matters, Other for newsletters and notifications. After a week or two of correcting it (“this isn’t important, this is”), it learns your habits and starts saving you a meaningful amount of mental energy.
If meetings are your problem instead, try Focus Time in Outlook Calendar. You block out chunks of time, and it auto-declines (or politely pushes back on) meeting invites during those blocks. It also dims your Teams notifications so you can actually concentrate.
Most people resist this because it feels rude. It’s not. Protecting an hour or two of focus time per day is what lets you actually finish work, instead of just attending meetings about work.
Excel: Flash Fill is the trick that feels like magic
If you’ve ever had a column of names and needed to split them into “first name” and “last name,” or had a column of full email addresses you needed to extract just the domain from — you’ve probably done it manually one cell at a time. Don’t.
In Excel, type the result you want in the cell next to the data, then start typing the second one. Excel will guess the pattern and offer to fill the rest down for you. Press Enter (or Ctrl + E) and it does the lot. It works for splitting names, reformatting dates, extracting numbers from text, capitalising things — basically any time the pattern is obvious to a human.
It’s saved more time across more offices than any other Excel feature in the last decade.
A bonus tip: keyboard shortcuts that pay off forever
If you only learn three shortcuts, learn these:
- Ctrl + Shift + V — Paste text without the formatting (huge for cleaning up content pasted from emails or websites)
- Windows key + V — Opens your clipboard history, so you can paste something you copied three things ago (turn this on in Windows Settings under “Clipboard”)
- Ctrl + L in Excel — Turns a plain range into a proper Table, which makes sorting, filtering, and formulas dramatically easier
Each of these saves you about 10 seconds a time. Used a few times a day, that’s hours back over a year.
The bigger picture
Microsoft 365 isn’t really about Word and Excel anymore. It’s about everything talking to each other — your calendar, your files, your chat, your email — so you spend less time shuffling things between apps. The tricks above are small, but they nudge you towards the way the system is designed to work, instead of fighting it.
Pick two or three to try this week. The ones that stick will quietly save you time forever.
Want your team to get more out of Microsoft 365? Talk to the Key I.T. team — we help Melbourne businesses set up, secure, and actually make the most of their Microsoft 365 environment. Learn more at IT support for Business in Melbourne
