Office Live Workspace Team Blog

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

  (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.  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     - 2 weeks ago

• Make a good home office great with Office Live Workspace

  (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 - 4 weeks ago

• How Office Live Workspace is helping our group project stand out

  (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. 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 - 4 weeks ago