One Drive for Business Help Guide

Managing your files in OneDrive for Busines

 

 

 

Credits

Microsoft Office Training Centre

Editorial

Charis Alexandra Training

 

Managing your files in OneDrive for Business

After you sync your OneDrive for Business files with your computer, you can put away your browser and manage your files like other files on your computer. Need to add a file to OneDrive for Business? Just drag it to your OneDrive for Business folder. You move, rename, and delete your files the same way you're used to, with one important difference: the changes you make to OneDrive for Business files will sync to all your other devices. So if you delete a file here, it's deleted everywhere.

Copy or move files in OneDrive for Business

 

• In File Explorer, select the files you want to copy or move.
• Right-click the files and drag them to your OneDrive - YourCompanyName folder or to another location.

• Select Copy here or Move here on the shortcut menu.

Rename a file in OneDrive for Business

1. Right-click the file you want to rename in your OneDrive - YourCompanyName folder.
2. Select Rename on the shortcut menu.
3. Type the new name for your file.

 

Delete a file in OneDrive for Business

• Select the file you want to delete in your OneDrive - YourCompanyName folder.
• Press Delete on your keyboard.

Tip   Remember, any changes you make to a file in your OneDrive for Business folder apply to all devices, not just to this computer. The changes will sync to all your other devices.

Dragging and dropping files to OneDrive for Business

You can upload files to your OneDrive for Business by just dragging them from your computer. OneDrive for Business shows you where you can drag and drop files to add files to a library.

• At the top of the page, select the Office 365 app launcher, and then select OneDrive.

• Find the documents that you want to upload on your computer and drag them to your OneDrive for Business.

Notes   

• The first time you click OneDrive, you see some setup screens and instructions while your personal site is being set up. You may have to wait awhile and then click OneDrive again before continuing to step 2.
• If you don’t see the option to drag files, update your copy of Office.
• The Edge browser doesn't support drag and drop into OneDrive for Business. Internet Explorer 11 is supported.

Here’s another way to upload files:

• Instead of dragging files, select Upload.

In OneDrive for Business you can choose Files. Use the Open dialog box to select the files you want to upload, and then click Open.

For SharePoint Online use the Add a Document dialog box. Click Browse and select the files you want to upload. Click Open and then click OK.

 

Note   You can only drag and drop, or upload files in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. If you need to upload folders, consider syncing the folder with your computer. For more information on syncing, see Sync OneDrive for Business or site libraries to your computer

Tip   Your files are private unless you decide to share them. To share files easily with everyone in your organization, drag them to your Shared with everyone folder. For more information, see sharing files with others.

Seeing your files from other devices

After you upload files to OneDrive for Business, you can see them from other devices by just signing into your Office 365 site in your browser, and then clicking OneDrive. Here are the details.

• On any device, sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account. For example, ellen@contoso.onmicrosoft.com, ellen@contoso.edu, or ellen@contoso.com. If you're not sure what your work or school account is, check the welcome email that asked you to sign in the first time.

• At the top of the page, select OneDrive. Or, select the app launcher , and then select OneDrive.

• The files you upload from any device are right there for you to use.

Tip   Your files are private unless you decide to share them. To share files with everyone in your organization, upload or move them to your Shared with Everyone folder. For more about sharing, see Sharing files with others.

Set up Office Mobile on your phone or tablet

To get your Office Mobile apps to work with Office 365, choose your device.

 

Saving and opening files

You can work with the files you store in OneDrive for Business right from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office desktop apps. There's no need to go to your Office 365 site in a browser.

Save a file to OneDrive for Business from an Office desktop app

With a document open in an Office desktop app, click File > Save As > OneDrive - YourCompanyName. For example, OneDrive - Contoso.

• Browse to the location where you want to save the file, and then click Save.

Open a OneDrive for Business file from an Office desktop app

• In an Office desktop app, click File > Open > OneDrive - YourCompanyName. For example, OneDrive - Contoso.

Browse to the file you want to open, and then click Open.

Tips   If you don't see OneDrive - YourCompanyName, click Add a Place > Office 365 SharePoint. Then sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account.

Once you add OneDrive for Business as a place in one Office app, you can save files from all your Office apps.

Syncing your files with your computer

Sync OneDrive for Business to your computer, and then get to your files in File Explorer instead of in a web browser. All your changes sync to OneDrive for Business whenever you’re online.

• At the top of the page, select OneDrive. Or, select the app launcher , and then select OneDrive.

• On your OneDrive for Business page, click Sync.

• At the prompt, click Sync Now to start the sync app.
• The app automatically fills out the name and web address of your OneDrive for Business library.
• Select Sync Now in the app to start syncing.
• You can click Show my files in the app to open the synced OneDrive for Business folder in File Explorer. The folder appears in your Windows Favorites as OneDrive for Business or OneDrive - YourCompanyName.

Note   To sync files to your computer, you need the OneDrive for Business sync app, available with an Office 365 subscription that includes Office 2013 desktop applications. If you don’t have Office 2013, you can download the OneDrive for Business sync app.

Managing your files in OneDrive for Business

After you sync your OneDrive for Business files with your computer, you can put away your browser and manage your files like other files on your computer. Need to add a file to OneDrive for Business? Just drag it to your OneDrive for Business folder. You move, rename, and delete your files the same way you're used to, with one important difference: the changes you make to OneDrive for Business files will sync to all your other devices. So if you delete a file here, it's deleted everywhere.

Copy or move files in OneDrive for Business

• In File Explorer, select the files you want to copy or move.
• Right-click the files and drag them to your OneDrive - YourCompanyName folder or to another location.

• Select Copy here or Move here on the shortcut menu.

Rename a file in OneDrive for Business

• Right-click the file you want to rename in your OneDrive - YourCompanyName folder.
• Select Rename on the shortcut menu.
• Type the new name for your file.

Delete a file in OneDrive for Business

• Select the file you want to delete in your OneDrive - YourCompanyName folder.
• Press Delete on your keyboard.

Tip   Remember, any changes you make to a file in your OneDrive for Business folder apply to all devices, not just to this computer. The changes will sync to all your other devices.

Sharing files with others

• When you store your files in OneDrive for Business, you can share with others from any device by going to your Office 365 site in a browser.
• You can also share a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet right from within Office without even going to Office 365 in a separate window. Whichever way you choose to share Office files, you can work with others at the same time they work on a file and see the changes that other people make as they make them.

Share a file from a site

• At the top of the page, select OneDrive. Or, select the app launcher , and then select OneDrive.

• Select the file you want to share, and then select Share.

• In the Share window, type the name of each person you want to share the file with. As you type each name, suggestions appear that match your contacts. When you see the name you want, select it to add it to the invitation list.

Tip   To share files with everyone in your organization, type Everyone instead of the name of a person.

• Select the permission in the list that you want to grant people.
• You can change the permission later for any person.
• If you want, type a message to send to all the people you're inviting.
• The email message sends a link to the shared document.
• If you don't want to send an email to invitees, clear Send an email invitation.
• Click Share.

Share a file from an Office desktop app

• With the file open in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or another Office app, click File > Share > Share with People.

• in the Share dialog, click Share with people.

• Type the name of each person you want to share the file with. As you type each name, suggestions appear that match your contacts. When you see the name you want, select it to add it to the invitation list.
• Select the permission in the list that you want to grant people.
• You can change the permission later for any person.
• If you want, type a message you want to send to all the people you're inviting.
• The email message sends a link to the shared document.
• Click Share.

Work on files with others at the same time

• When you store and share your files in OneDrive for Business, you can work with others at the same and avoid reconciling multiple versions of your files. Work together from either the online or the desktop versions of Word, PowerPoint, or OneNote. For workbooks, use Excel Online. If someone opens the workbook in the Excel desktop application, the workbook can’t be edited in Excel Online until it’s closed again in desktop Excel.

Here are a few details to keep in mind as you work with others:

• In the desktop programs, co-authoring works best in the most recent version of Office (Mac and Windows), but is also supported in Office 2010.
• There's no special co-authoring mode and no command to begin working together on a document. Just open the file for editing and start working.
• As you edit, the Office app tells you when other people are working too. In Word, you'll even see which paragraph they’re working on.
• Updates are handled differently in some programs from others. For example, OneNote notebooks and Excel Online workbooks show updates immediately. In Word documents, save the document to share your updates and to see others’ updates.

 

PowerPoint Pro Tips

Layered Objects on a crowded slide

Layered Objects

Do you ever have to deal with those crowded PowerPoint slides? You know; the ones with layers of overlapping shapes and text boxes—and you need to change the one in the middle of the pile. Some people move all the other objects out of the way so that they can see the one they want. Then they make a few changes and then move them all back again in to, hopefully, their original positions.

There has to be a better way. You can use the keyboard shortcuts Tab and Shift+Tab to cycle forward and backward through the stack of objects until you can see that the selection handles are around the one you want. Or, you can press Alt+F10 and turn on the...

Selection and Visibility Pane

There’s a control to turn this on and off on the Home tab but it’s easily missed. The Selection and Visibility Pane lists all the objects on your slide and you use it to identify and work on any object. Just click the Hide All button and then start clicking the eyes to the right to show selected objects, you’ll soon find the one you want. Make your changes, click the Show All button and you’re done. It’s so easy when you can see what you’re doing.

Selection and Visibility Pane ALT+F10

You will notice that PowerPoint uses its own fiendish naming scheme for all your objects, things like Rectangle 5, TextBox 4, AutoShape 22 make perfect sense until you have to animate them and then you have real problems trying to identify specific objects. All you have to do is rename them here according to their appearance and purpose and you’ll have a much easier time creating animations.

An object named something like Blue Box or Red Star is a lot easier to deal with than Rectangle 5. To rename an object, click the current name in the pane and replace the text.

Ruler, Gridlines and Guides

Are you still eyeballing objects on your slides to line them up? PowerPoint’s Smart Guides pop up when you are aligning objects and are a great help but for a slick and professional appearance you need to arrange your objects with precision. You need to see what you’re doing and see where things are. In short, you need gridlines, guides or your ruler, maybe all three. You’ll find them on the View tab or you can press the shortcut keys:

Rulers, Gridlines and Guides

Press Shift+F9  to show or hide the gridlines. Press Alt+F9  to show or hide guides. Press Alt+Shift+F9 to show or hide the ruler. The ruler appears around the top and left of the slide and is ideal for sizing and positioning, the grid is a design grid used to precisely align objects in relation to each other and the guides give you your centre lines.

Moving, Resizing, Rotating and Nudging Objects

You can use your mouse to move objects around but for fine control you should use the arrow keys on your keyboard. Click the object and then press any of the keys to move left, right, up or down. Hold down the Ctrl key while you press the arrow keys to nudge—move the shape in smaller increments.

Shortcuts for Resizing and Rotating

Press Shift+Right Arrow  or Shift+Left Arrow to enlarge or reduce the selected shape horizontally.

Press Shift+Up Arrow  or Shift+Down Arrow to enlarge or reduce the selected shape vertically.

Press Alt+Right Arrow to rotate the selected shape to the right.

Press Alt+ Left Arrow to rotate the selected shape to the left.

Formatting Text in Text Boxes

Are you formatting all the text in the text box or only a particular word or phrase in the text? If you are formatting all the text then there’s no need to drag across the text. Just click on the box and apply your formatting. Only select the text inside the box when you want to format just a part of it. You certainly do not want to try to select the text and end up moving the entire text box. Of course, that’s exactly what everybody does and mighty irritating is it too!

You need to be aware of your current selection. Look at the border of the text box—a solid line means the object itself is selected, a broken line means the text inside is selected. Either click the border of the box to select the object or click inside the text area to select the text. If you do this frequently then try remembering the following shortcut keys: Esc to select the text box when you have the text selected inside it. Enter to select the text inside the text box when you have the text box selected.

Text in the text box selected and the text box itself selected

Colour Matching with the Eyedropper

Colour matching

One of the best ways to create an impressive presentation is to use consistent colours. Ensuring that the various elements on your slide are the same colour creates a visual unity for your content. But it’s so hard to match colours precisely; the text on your slide needs to exactly match that shade of blue in your company logo. How do you do it?

As a design tool PowerPoint has definitely needed this for years but it was only introduced with PowerPoint 2013 so you will be disappointed with this one if you have an earlier version. PowerPoint 2013 features the Eyedropper which makes colour matching a breeze. You can match colours not only in your presentation but to any other colours on your screen.

The Eyedropper control

The Eyedropper is included on any drop-down menu that you use to pick a colour. On your PowerPoint slide, select a shape that you want to colour match and then click the Eyedropper. Move your mouse over any other object and observe the colour in the preview window beside the Eyedropper cursor. Just click when you see the desired colour to apply it to the shape.

Eyedropper cursor and RGB values

As you move your pointer around the screen a live preview of the colour appears. Hover or pause on a colour to see its RGB (Red Green Blue) colour coordinates. Click on the colour you want. To cancel without picking a colour, press Esc.

Matching the colours of PowerPoint objects on your slide to something outside of PowerPoint is just as easy. Once again, select the object that you want to colour match and, holding down your mouse’s primary button, drag to move the Eyedropper cursor outside of the PowerPoint window. You can now match any colour that you see on your screen, release the mouse to apply the desired colour.

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Excel- Dynamic Chart Data Ranges

Dynamic Ranges

You need a dynamic range when you want your Excel chart's data range to expand or contract automatically to plot a particular data range on your worksheet. It beats having to manually edit your data ranges every time.

While there are different ways of doing this, the method demonstrated here is the most flexible and involves your assigning the chart data range to a named range and then having  that name update with a formula based on Excel's OFFSET function.

Changing the time period of the chart

Here's our worksheet, we want our chart to plot the three data ranges Tom, Dick and Harry over the time period defined by the Start Date and the End Date, namely May 2015 to Sep 2015.

Worksheet showing the data ranges

And here's the corresponding chart, a simple line chart showing the three data ranges and the time period on the x axis. We want to be able to change the starting and ending dates by changing the dates in cells C2 and C3 and then have the chart update automatically.

Data period plotted from May to Sep 2015

Validation Lists

We change the dates by choosing a new value from the drop-down validation list which is linked to row 5 on the worksheet, the range where the dates are entered. To produce a valid range the start date must be before the end date. Just in case there's any issues with making sure that the dates entered are appropriate we can use formulas or Conditional Formatting to warn against making an incorrect entry.

As the dates change the ranges for the chart are recalculated and the chart updates. The start date has been changed from May 2015 to Jun 2015 and the new plot for the period Jun to Sep 2015 is illustrated below. A new end date for the chart can be specified in exactly the same way.

Data period plotted from Jun to Sep 2015

Creating the worksheet and chart

You might want to download the Excel file and work through the process. There's two worksheets in the workbook, Sheet1, which is the completed exercise and unfinished, which is the basic worksheet and chart where you can try out your names and formulas.

The first job is to create some names that we can use in our formulas as follows:

Name	Reference	Purpose
Date1	A5	Starting point for the dates
Data1	A6	Starting point for the Tom range
Data2	A7	Starting point for the Dick range
Data3	A8	Starting point for the Harry range
StartDate	C2	The starting date
EndDate	C3	The ending date
StartMatch	A2	The position of the Starting date in row 5
EndMatch	A3	The position of the Ending date in row 5

Names to be set up

You don't have to use Names for all the references but it's much easier to put your formulas together if you do. To create the names, click the relevant cell and then either type the name into Excel's Name Box (extreme left hand side of the formula bar) and press Enter or click the cell and click the Define Name control in the Defined Names group on the Formulas tab. Type the Name in and click OK.

The next job is to link the StartDate and EndDate cells to row 5 so that we can choose our dates easily. Click C2 (StartDate) and then click the Data Validation control on the Data tab. In the Settings tab make the following settings; from the Allow box, choose List and in the Source box, click row 5 on the worksheet.

Data Validation to link a cell to a range of values

Repeat the process for C3 (EndDate) and then click both the drop down lists in turn and choose a date from the list.

If you wanted to create some input validation for your worksheet and make sure that the end date selected from your list was actually after the start date then you could enter the following formula in a convenient cell:

=IF(C2>=C3,"Start is after End","")

This would not stop the entry being made but you would at least be aware that it was not correct.

Entering the worksheet formulas

There are two sets of formulas to be entered, the first ones are entered into cells and are used to spot the specified starting and ending dates in row 5 so that the chart data ranges can be calculated:

Name	Reference	Formula
StartMatch	A2	=MATCH(StartDate,5:5,0)
EndMatch	A3	=MATCH(EndDate,5:5,0)

Excel's MATCH function with Match Type 0 (Exact Match) is used to return a number indicating the position along row 5 where the dates corresponding to the specified start and end dates are located.

Entering the named formulas

The second set of formulas will calculate the ranges on the worksheet which are to be plotted on the chart based on the starting and ending dates. These formulas are not entered into worksheet cells, instead they are entered into Names. An unusual place to enter formulas. Click any cell on the worksheet and then click Define Name on the Formulas tab. Type the name into the Name box and then copy and paste the formula into the Refers to box. Click OK.

Defining a Name as a formula

Name	Formula
rngDate	=OFFSET(Date1,,StartMatch-1,,(EndMatch-StartMatch)+1)
rngTom	=OFFSET(Data1,,StartMatch-1,,(EndMatch-StartMatch)+1)
rngDick	=OFFSET(Data2,,StartMatch-1,,(EndMatch-StartMatch)+1)
rngHarry	=OFFSET(Data3,,StartMatch-1,,(EndMatch-StartMatch)+1)

OFFSET is Excel's general pointer function and is used to return a variable range of cells. The narrative of the first formula is as follows: "Starting from Date1, stay on the same row but go over to the first date match cell and point to a range of cells whose width is the product of the EndMatch and StartMatch values". The positive and negative adjustments are necessary to precisely pick out the ranges.

Click the Names Manager control to review the Names set up in the worksheet

Plotting the chart

The final job is to get the chart to use the calculated ranges rngDate, rngTom, rngDick and rngHarry, which correspond to the cells in rows 5 to 8 for the period bounded by the start and end dates. You used to be able to go straight into Excel's chart SERIES formula and edit the ranges directly. This never seems to work for me nowadays. 

Editing the Chart data ranges

You have to get the the Name into the SERIES formula for the chart.

You must always use the sheet name to qualify the range name and use the Select Data control on Chart Tools, Design tab to edit the formula rather than try to edit the SERIES formula in the formula bar. Click the first range and then click the Edit button.

When you enter the reference to the name, use the sheet name, like "Sheet1" and Excel takes care of the rest. The original SERIES formula looked like this:

=SERIES(Sheet1!$A$6,Sheet1!$F$5:$J$5,Sheet1!$F$6:$J$6,1)

And when you have finished editing it will be transformed to this:

=SERIES(Sheet1!$A$6,'date-period-chart.xlsx'!rngDate,'date-period-chart.xlsx'!rngTom,1)

That's got the names into the formula for the chart and now they will change dynamically as the worksheet dates change. Job done.

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