Supercharge Your Business. Getting Small Businesses Ready for 2025 with Microsoft 365
How Microsoft 365 is Empowering Small Businesses In the ever-changing world of productivity and collaboration tools, Microsoft 365 continues to shine as a vital tool for small businesses. With a treasure trove of applications designed to boost efficiency, security, and innovation, Microsoft 365 rolled out some game-changing features in 2024, earning high praise from industry experts. Last year was a rollercoaster for business owners and their customers. They faced rising inflation, tighter budgets, and the AI revolution. Through it all, Microsoft 365 was the trusty partner that helped businesses run smoothly and operate productively. The suite introduced exciting new features, integrated smart AI capabilities, and laid out a promising roadmap to tackle current trends and challenges. Recapping An Exciting 2024 Here are some notable new features we released in Microsoft 365 -- starting with Teams and Teams Phone: We introduced the Queues App in the fall, a Teams-native solution designed to empower organizations to manage Teams Phone engagements directly from within Teams. With it, they can manage call queues, auto attendants, get real-time metrics, and see reporting – to ensure they’re conducting customer engagement efficiently. We introduced Shared Calling, which makes a single phone number and calling plan sharable by a group, so teams can better manage calls in coordination. We enhanced survivable calling with the Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA), a backup solution designed to keep your phone services running smoothly, even during network outages. It now supports call transfer, forwarding, and incoming calls during network outages. In Microsoft Excel, we added some powerful updates: The ability to automatically sync data from Forms to Excel for the web. In real-time, responses can be synced between the two apps, ensuring data is always up-to-date. There’s seamless integration so if you go to an active Form and the Responses page, you can click “Open results in Excel” to create an Excel worksheet in OneDrive to do deeper manipulation of your data. The addition of checkboxes that can drive and be driven by existing Excel functions. With Interactive Checkboxes, they automatically check or uncheck based on the value of another cell. And finally, we integrated Python into Excel for users to have the ability to manipulate data in the familiar Excel environment but now with access to powerful Python's libraries and plots to make even deeper analysis possible. We made generally available a brand new Outlook: It has an exciting, newly redesigned interface, new productivity features, and integration with Copilot. Small and medium-sized businesses currently on Microsoft 365 are already moving to it but the choice to keep using classic Outlook will still be available. To help small businesses conserve their marketing budget, we introduced Microsoft Clipchamp in the fall of 2023 and Microsoft Designer in the summer of 2024. Clipchamp is a user-friendly video editor for creating professional-quality videos without needing technical skills. In Clipchamp, we rolled out over 100 pre-built templates, transitions, noise-suppression, background removal, auto-compose, and text-to-speech – saving users tons of time in making videos that may have taken many hours to do before. Designer is a powerful, AI image-generating and graphic design tool that can help any small business create professional-quality visuals with ease – without needing technical skills. Key updates were: We integrated Designer into Word and PowerPoint so users can generate images and use those images within these apps. In addition, Designer will suggest design templates for your slides. A Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription is needed and unlocks the use of Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps. And lastly, in 2024, we empowered SMBs to see how AI could make them more productive by expanding Microsoft Copilot into our popular apps like Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams. Users can now summarize emails, generate insights in Word and Excel, and unlock powerful meeting insights in Teams. Among many new AI-powered features, we introduced Intelligent Call Recap in Teams which serves up AI-powered insights and recaps for your VoIP and PSTN calls in Teams, helping you stay on top of important details. Microsoft’s Continued Recognitions With Analysts and Customers As a testament to our excellence, Microsoft was once again crowned a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications for the sixth year in a row! Here’s what Gartner called out: Microsoft Teams is the top pick for businesses, especially when using it for internal collaboration. With a super reliable 99.999% uptime, it has solid telephony services to keep you connected. Teams is perfect for global cloud telephony, offering flexible PSTN options. Plus, Gartner called out our Operator Connect feature, which allows businesses to connect their existing telephony services directly to Teams, is now available in over 96 countries, including India. Copilot in Teams and Teams Premium brings cutting-edge AI features to meetings, chats, and calls. Gartner said that for those seeking the latest in AI, Microsoft is rapidly innovating. Teams now has over 350 million monthly active users. This growth highlights the platform’s continued popularity and widespread adoption among businesses worldwide. If you haven’t tried running your meetings on Teams, there’s no better time to. And over on G2 Reviews, Microsoft 365 currently has 4.6 out of 5 stars. Users like its ease of use, seamless integrations, and the extensive suite of tools it offers. Small businesses have praised the platform’s ability to streamline workflows and supercharge productivity. TechRadar also recognized Microsoft 365 as “the original and best office productivity suite” in December 2024, giving it 4.5 out of 5 stars. We’re thrilled that they said: “What ensured that MS Office became a market leader is the comprehensive way data can be covered by different applications and moved between them, making working more efficient and hassle-free.” Transforming Operations: How ICG Build Scaled with Microsoft 365 ICG, a startup construction firm, has successfully leveraged Microsoft 365 to establish and streamline its entire operations from day one. By utilizing Excel for budgeting, Word and PowerPoint for creating branded templates, Outlook for managing emails, Power BI for data visualization, and Teams for communication and collaboration, ICG has been able to scale its business efficiently. Here are some insights from their experience: Nick Masci, Principal & Co-Founder at ICG, shares: “Having everything in Microsoft 365 makes finding information fast and easy. Microsoft 365 has been instrumental in setting up our entire operations, from budgeting in Excel to managing emails in Outlook.” Melissa McEwen, Principal & Co-founder at ICG, adds, “Using Microsoft 365, we’ve been able to create branded templates in Word and PowerPoint, which has streamlined our client presentations and enhanced our professional image.” These testimonials highlight the transformative impact of Microsoft 365 on ICG’s operational efficiency and client engagement. Navigating 2025 Together Small businesses are in for another exciting ride in 2025 as they face trends like the continued integration of AI into our lives, a shift to returning to the office, and the continued need to be as efficient as possible. Microsoft 365 is here to support you with tools that boost productivity like Copilot; Teams and Teams Phone to support all work models, and powerful features that come included in our core apps like Design Ideas in PowerPoint that gives you multiple layout and design options to help you get your new slide started. Curious to learn more? You can read more about how to choose the right plan here. Are you a small or medium business owner/decision maker currently using Microsoft 365? We'd like to hear from you! We invite you to apply to join the Microsoft 365 SMB Customer Advisory Board. Applications accepted until February 28th, 2025. See aka.ms/SMBCAB for more details.Supercharge Your Business with Microsoft Tools: Create Stunning Documents and Presentations
Create Stunning Documents and Presentations In today’s competitive business landscape, building a strong brand is essential for standing out and gaining customer loyalty. Microsoft 365 offers a suite of tools that empower businesses to create professional and visually appealing materials, helping to establish and enhance your brand identity. With Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, businesses can produce polished presentations and documents that reflect your brand's professionalism and creativity. PowerPoint's pre-designed templates and themes make it easy to create visually appealing slides, while features like transitions, custom animations, and video embedding add a dynamic touch. Discover Powerpoint’s Secret Weapons PowerPoint remains a cornerstone of presentation software, trusted by millions worldwide. Its intuitive interface and easy-to-use features make it an ideal choice for small business owners. With a plethora of pre-designed templates and themes, creating visually appealing slides is straightforward. You can use a range of features to create stunning presentations like: Transitions to add smooth, dynamic transitions between slides. You can choose from nearly 50 different types from subtle, to exciting ones, and to really dynamic types with added effects. Custom Animations to add personality and emphasize specific slide elements. You can tune your animations with triggers and effects so that objects in slides appear only when you want them to. You can also embed videos from your device, or even online videos to make your presentation more engaging. This feature, like Transitions and Custom Animations, help make presentations appear more sophisticated and show off your company’s brand in the best light. You can even convert your presentation into a video for on-demand viewing with Export to Video. Your customers, prospects, or partners can then view important content at their convenience – perfect for you to convey follow-up materials after a sales presentation, for example. Speaking of sales presentations. With PowerPoint Live, you can present your slides directly within a Microsoft Teams meeting, so you don’t need to switch between different apps or share your entire screen. You can see your slides, notes, and the audience all in one view so you have full control while you’re presenting. Keeping an eye on the room while presenting is especially important for high-stakes presentations and with PowerPoint Live, everything happens seamlessly within Teams. Press the Designer 1 button in the ribbon to get additional design features: Automatic Design Suggestions to give you slide templates and designs that you choose from to fit your brand to achieve a polished, professional look. Designer works in the background to analyze the content and provide design suggestions like layout options, color schemes, and relevant images. With Smart Layouts, Designer can detect elements like pictures, charts, and tables, and suggest cohesive layouts that make your slides look their best. Visual Enhancements can transform text-heavy slides into engaging visuals using SmartArt, making your presentation pop with imagery. Designer can even recommend high-quality photos and icons from the Microsoft 365 library with the Contextual Images and Icons feature. Format Your Documents Like a Pro For small businesses, documents produced in Word makes you look more professional and grown up. Word provides a wide range of templates for various document types, including reports, proposals, and invoices, ensuring that your business documents always look professional. One of the most powerful features in Word is Real-time Co-authoring, which we first introduced in 2013. It allows multiple people to work on a document simultaneously, which is incredibly beneficial for small businesses and teams who want to work together while meeting short deadlines. Here’s how it works as it enables live collaboration while ensuring your company looks its best. When a document is stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, multiple users can open and edit it at the same time. Changes are visible in real-time, so you can see what others are working on as they do it. Word automatically saves versions of the document, so you can track changes and revert to previous versions if needed. Authors and Reviewers can make Comments and Chat with one another and discuss changes directly within the document. Best of all, Co-authoring works on Word for the web, desktop, and mobile apps. So team members can collaborate from anywhere, using any device and get work done much faster with Co-authoring. Other popular features that come with Word include: Themes, which provide a coordinated set of fonts, colors, and effects to apply to your entire document to make it look consistent and visually pleasing. Charts and Tables: you can insert and customize charts and tables to present data clearly. This is useful for reports and proposals. Watermarks: To enhance document security and branding, you can add text or image watermarks (like “Confidential” or your company logo) to the background of your document. Themes, Charts and Tables, and Watermarks can make your document stand out with very little effort from the author. Word makes it easy for your work to shine, and start building a beautiful company brand. Export to PDF: To ensure your document cannot be edited and stays as you intended, you can turn it into a PDF. Doing so is easy. Just go to the “File” menu and choose PDF under “Save As”. This process ensures that your document looks the same on any device and is easy to share or print. Your work stays the way you intended it to look. Just like in PowerPoint, press the Designer 2 button on the Ribbon to access more capabilities that can make your document more visually appealing and professionally-looking: Enhance the appearance and consistency of your document though Design Suggestions, which provides a variety of design themes and layout options that you can apply to your document to make it more visually appealing. Formatting Consistency, which automatically identifies and fixes formatting inconsistencies in your document, ensuring a uniform look throughout. Smart Recommendations: Based on the content of your document, Designer suggests relevant design elements, such as fonts, colors, and styles. Add Microsoft 365 Copilot And Do Even More If you already have a Microsoft 365 business or enterprise plan, you can add Copilot at an additional cost to unlock an AI-powered image generator in both PowerPoint and Word. With this powerful AI feature, you can match the capabilities of a creative agency designer instantly. Even without any design skills or experience, you can create images ready for internal or external use at the press of a button. For small businesses, this means saving valuable time and resources while achieving beautiful results without needing to hire a designer. Simply ask Copilot to generate images to your specifications, and you can enhance your slides or documents. Use it to create background images, hero images, or illustrations that better convey your points in a long document. AI image generation can help your Marketing and Branding, to create unique and engaging visuals for marketing campaigns, social media posts, and promotional materials. This can help SMBs stand out and attract more customers. Or use it for Customer Engagement, with personalized images for customer communications like newsletters and emails, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Lastly, you can use it for Product Ideation: whether it's to storyboard your customer experience or to strategize a new product launch, you can ask AI image generation to visually communicate your out-of-the box business ideas with ease. Get Started: Do Beautiful Work Today If you haven’t already, try the many free features in PowerPoint like Transitions, Animations, Embedded Video, and Icon Library in PowerPoint to amp up your slides. In Word, you can also access popular features like Themes, Charts & Tables, and Watermarks to make polished-looking documents. Copilot unlocks additional design tools in PowerPoint and Word to offer small business owners the professional tools they need to create stunning presentations and documents with the magic of AI. By leveraging AI image generation, you can make beautiful images for your clients and partners, while saving time and budget. Don’t let a lack of design skills or resources hold you back—try out these Microsoft tools and experience the difference they can make for your business. [1] Designer is only available in the online versions of PowerPoint and Word. [2] Designer is only available in the online versions of PowerPoint and Word.
