Slides from the November 17, 2018 SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (#SPSTC) event, with Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) and Tom Duff (@duffbert) going head-to-head in 5 rounds of their favorite Microsoft Office and Office 365 productivity tips, with the audience picking the winners in each round.

1. Office 365 Productivity Tips
“Mayhem in Minneapolis – The Rematch"
Christian Buckley
CollabTalk LLC
Thomas Duff
Cambia Health
SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities
11/17/2018

2. Christian Buckley
Founder & CEO of CollabTalk LLC
cbuck@CollabTalk.com
@buckleyplanet
http://www.buckleyplanet.com

3. Thomas Duff
Software Engineer at Cambia Health
Thomas.Duff@CambiaHealth.com
@Duffbert
http://oneminuteofficemagic.com

4. Thank you
#SPSTC
sponsors!

5. Rules of Engagement
1. Each opponent will take turns
2. No duplicates
3. Audience votes after each round
4. No hitting below the belt
5. Winner based on overall voting

6. Let’s get started!

7. Round 1

8. Even with search, sometimes critical conversations can get lost within platforms like Teams and Yammer.
By using the Saved feature, you can bookmark these conversations so that they can be easily found again,
saving you time and effort to retrace your steps. Simply click on your profile image, and select Saved to
find your list of bookmarked conversations.
Bookmarking in Teams

9. Adding a Background Blur to your video meetings in Microsoft Teams
If you're used to having video meetings in Microsoft Teams and you're the person on the video, I know
you've thought about what might be showing in the background while you're presenting. You may be
neat and tidy, or you… may not be. I would be in that second category… But now in Microsoft Teams, you
can use the Background Blur option to make it harder to tell just how many pizza boxes might be right
behind you.
Here's me on a Microsoft
Teams video, and you can see
that the table behind me has…
stuff on it:

10. Adding a Background Blur to your video meetings in Microsoft Teams
Don't judge…
But I can activate the Background Blur option by clicking on the Ellipsis button:

11. Adding a Background Blur to your video meetings in Microsoft Teams
And by magic, I appear to be SO much more professional now!

12. Background Blur in Teams – in real life
You never know what is going to happen
behind you when joining a team meeting, or
giving a presentation while at home or on
the road. A great example of how this AI-
enabled ability to blur backgrounds in Teams
would have helped this reporter with the live
tv mishap...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
365/blog/2018/09/24/10-new-ways-for-everyone-to-
achieve-more-in-the-modern-workplace/
Christian’s value-add

13. Who won the round?
22 votes 15 votes

14. Round 2

15. Inserting multiple blank lines in an Excel spreadsheet
This is a really simple tip that I wish I had known about sooner, instead of copy and pasting
blank rows for an Excel spreadsheet. Instead of just inserting a single blank row, you can easily
insert multiple blank rows by highlighting the number of rows you need.
Here's an example Excel spreadsheet with 15 rows of data:

16. Inserting multiple blank lines in an Excel spreadsheet
In order to insert a blank row, I highlight the row I want the inserted row to appear above, and
right-click on the highlighted row. That gives me the dropdown menu to select Insert:

17. Inserting multiple blank lines in an Excel spreadsheet
Now I have my blank row, but what if I want five blank rows… or more?

18. Inserting multiple blank lines in an Excel spreadsheet
This time, I highlight five rows and right-click to get the Insert option:

19. Inserting multiple blank lines in an Excel spreadsheet
Voila! I have five blank rows now! Much faster than adding one at a time!

20. AI-Powered To-Do Tracking in Word
Editor—Word’s AI-powered writing assistant—
is an indispensable tool for the written word.
But sometimes you need to leave a
placeholder in your document and come back
to it later to stay in your flow.
Word now helps users create and fill in these
placeholders without leaving the flow of their
work.
For example, type TODO: finish this section
or <<insert closing here>> and Word
recognizes and tracks them as to-dos. When
you come back to the document, you’ll see a
list of your remaining to-dos, and you can click
each one to navigate back to the right spot.

21. AI-Powered To-Do Tracking in Word
Once you’ve created your to-dos, Word can also
help you complete them. If you need help from a
friend or coworker, just @mention them within a
placeholder. Word sends them a notification with
a “deep link” to the relevant place in the
document.
Soon, they’ll be able to reply to the notification
with their contributions, and those contributions
will be inserted directly into the document—
making it easy to complete the task with an
email from any device.
Over time, Office will use AI to help fill in many
of these placeholders. In the next few months,
Word will use Microsoft Search to suggest
content for a to-do like <<insert chart of
quarterly sales figures>>. You will be able to
pick from the results and insert content from
another document with a single click.
Currently in preview with Office Insiders.

22. Who won the round?
20 votes 19 votes

23. Round 3

24. Insert Data from Picture into Excel
With Insert Data from Picture, you can take a picture of a
printed data table with your Android device and convert
that analog information into an Excel spreadsheet with a
single click.
New image recognition functionality automatically
converts the picture to a fully editable table in Excel,
eliminating the need for you to manually enter data.
Insert Data from Picture will be available in preview for the
Excel Android app soon. No dates for iOS devices just yet.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
365/blog/2018/09/24/bringing-ai-to-excel-4-new-features-announced-
today-at-ignite/

25. Excel Flash Fill on names
I'm sitting in a training session today, and I saw the trainer do something in Excel that I didn't
know was possible… Flash Fill can complete columns of names based on other columns.
I have an Excel table with a list of Full Names, followed by columns for First Name and Last
Name:

26. Excel Flash Fill on names
If I enter the first name (Tom) of the first entry (Tom Duff) in the First Name column, I can then
click on the cell underneath it and click on Flash Fill:

27. Excel Flash Fill on names
Hey! It filled in all the first names from the Full Names column:

28. Excel Flash Fill on names
Same thing works for the Last Name:

29. Excel Flash Fill on names
Like so:

30. Who won the round?
12 votes 25 votes
Christian has called a
Red Card on the round,
explaining it as follows:
“On this “win,” Tom
appealed to the audience
and claimed that because
my feature was not yet
generally available (GA), I
should not receive any
votes…and yet he went on
to concede that it was the
superior tip. My argument
is that any capability
featured on the Microsoft
blog is fair use. As such, I
officially claim that an
asterisk be placed on this
Round as formal protest.”

31. Round 4

32. Filtering Outlook email via Ribbon Bar options
Unless you're a search ninja, you're likely to only type in a search term in the Outlook search bar, and hope
for the best. However, there are a number of other options you can use that are found in the Ribbon Bar.
Here's where to find them…
From the Home tab in Outlook, go clear over to the right side and click the Filter Email option. That will
show a drop-down list of eight search options you can use to find stuff using more than just a keyword:

33. Filtering Outlook email via Ribbon Bar options
The predefined options are Unread, Has Attachments, This Week, Categorized, Flagged, Important, Sent
To: Me or CC: Me, and View Items Expiring Soon. I'm going to click on the Has Attachments option to
filter my email to only show me things that have attachments on them:

34. Filtering Outlook email via Ribbon Bar options
As you can see, I now have a list of all my emails that have attachments. You'll also see the keyword
hasattachments:yes in the search bar, which means you could use that along with other keywords to build
some complex searches to narrow down your returned search to be only the items you're looking for:

35. New AI-Powered Inking Features
As of October, there are several new AI-powered Inking capabilities in Word and PowerPoint.
You can now use a touch-enabled device and digital pen to ink your ideas and transform them
into perfectly formatted content. You can also choose from 30 new 3D models with built-in
animations to bring your content to life.

36. Who won the round?
31 votes 7 votes

37. Round 5

38. Auto Transcription and Search of Video Content
Microsoft Stream is now available to small
and medium-sized businesses through
Microsoft 365 Business, Office 365 Business
Premium, and Office 365Business
Essentials.
Stream is an intelligent video service, which
makes it easy to discover and securely
share videos from across the organization,
with features like auto-generated and
searchable transcripts, and AI-powered
speaker detection.
Video is becoming increasingly important
as a knowledge management capture and
consumption tool, and it is essential that
you properly track this IP and make it
searchable/discoverable to your
organization – and Stream is the way to
accomplish that in Office 365.

39. Finding the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Teams
Sandra showed me a cool trick today that is useful for anyone using Microsoft Teams. You can quickly get a
pop-up list of all the keyboard shortcuts that might save you a few seconds every time you do something
out in Teams.
In the Microsoft Teams client application, place your cursor in the search bar at the top, and press ALT + /
at the same time:

40. Finding the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Teams
This keystroke combination causes the following pop-up screen to appear with a number of keyboard
shortcuts you can use in the Microsoft Teams client:

41. Finding the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Teams
At the bottom of the pop-up screen, you'll see a link for See Shortcuts For All Platforms. This gives you the
same information as above, but it covers both the Microsoft Teams client application as well as the web
application:

42. Who won the round?
19 votes 21 votes

43. Overall winner?

44. Overall winner?
Christian!

45. Current Leaderboard
Most Rounds Won – Tie (20)
Most Events Won – Tie (4)
Most Overall Votes - Tom
Event Date Location Rounds Won Votes Won Rounds Won Votes Won
9/12/2017 Online 3 31 2 29
10/28/2017 SPSTC 1 74 4 96
11/28/2017 Online 2 11 3 15
1/16/2018 Online 4 167 1 104
2 54 3 53
3 152 2 122
3 141 2 136
2 87 3 104
TOTAL 20 717 20 659
Tom Christian
11/17/2018 SPSTC
7/25/2018 Online
2/3/2018 SPSUTAH
8/28/2018 Online

46. Thank you!
Christian Buckley
@buckleyplanet
http://www.buckleyplanet.com
Tom Duff
@Duffbert
http://OneMinuteOfficeMagic.com