Microsoft Loop, the newest productivity tool from the tech giant, was recently made available
to the public, finally! People say it can be a Notion killer! But is it really? Let’s find out.
Hey! How’s it going? My name is Shu. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time
since Microsoft announced Loop in 2021. It all sounded promising so I’m exicted
to see how it performs. What is Microsoft Loop?
Microsoft Loop is all-in-one document editor, a Notion-like app where you can think, plan
and create. Just like Notion, it is designed to meet different needs such as project management,
content creation, and team collaboration. So there are lots of similarities. You
can create multiple workspaces for different projects and teams. And within each workspace,
you have a bunch of documents. You can create a subpage from this three-dots menu, but still
it looks a bit messy in the sidebar because there's no indentation or a way to fold it.
Also, there's this Ideas button which allows you to quickly capture your ideas and share
them with others. Personally, I don't like having to give each idea a title
because sometimes it's hard to come up with a good one. But it could be just me.
Before we move on, let me quickly tell you about my favourite book guide app,
Shortform who's kindly sponsoring this video. They’re like book summaries on steroids. It
is the best way to learn ideas from all those books you’ve always wanted to read.
I’ve been using it for a while now and I have to say, it’s been a game-changer for me. Unlike
other book summaries, Shortform’s book guides are super detailed so you get the books’ key points
at a deep level. And the best part is that they’re not just a simple summary, but also
have interactive exercises to help you understand the books better as well as smart insights which
connect relevant ideas from different books and authors. This is actually the biggest reason why
I chose Shorform over other book summary apps because the smart insights make it easier to
discover new ideas and more interesting books. Shortform also has a new Chrome extension with
AI that can be added to your browser. To use it, you can click on the extension icon and
then click Summarize to get your instant summary. What's awesome is that it works on any article as
well as Youtube videos! This is especially useful when you want to watch videos to learn something,
but don't have enough time. You can now get the key points of the video in a few seconds. It’s
still in early beta stages so keep that in mind, but if you join through my link today,
you’ll have early access and won’t be affected by any possible price changes if they do so later on.
If you’re interested in trying Shortform, go to shortform.com/shuomi where you’ll
get a free trial and 25% off the annual subscription - which is 3 months free.
Alright, let's get back to the main topic. Once you made a page, you can start with one of
the pre-made templates by Microsoft which are for things like decision making, meetings and problem
framing. They all look decent and useful, but there are only 10 templates available which is
nowhere near what Notion offers. You may think, "okay, I'm just going to create my own template".
But currently there's no way to do that or get ones made by other people. But I'm sure this
is a feature that'll be added in the future. So, let's just start with a blank page for
now. Like most note apps nowadays, it has a slash command menu which
you can use to format your text, insert things like a table, image and a date.
In terms of what you can insert, it's only limited to a table, checklist and some
components from templates like a task list, progress tracker and voting table. This is kind
of cool that you can insert a part of a template directly into your note. But, they're all just a
variation of table. You can't change its view to a timeline or calendar like in Notion. I especially
miss the board view because I use it a lot. But again, that's probably coming in the future.
Oh here's a big difference between Notion and Loop. In Notion, you can include a mention
of another page by using at-mark or double square brackets. This is great because you
can jump between pages easily. On the other hand, Loop doesn't allow you to do this. You
can only include a mention of a person. But instead, you can still embed another
page or a part of a page. So for example, if you want to use this block for a project page you're
working on. You could turn this into something called a Loop component. And then copy the URL.
And then paste it in the project page. Since this is a synced block, any edits you make on
this block will automatically update the original block. This is actually the biggest strength of
Loop. Notion also has something similar, but the difference is that Loop lets you embed any block
in Loop in other Microsoft apps too. Right now, I don't have the access to this feature,
but it's supposed to work like this: you create a Loop component you want to share, and then embed
it in apps like Microsoft Teams and Outlook. Then other people can directly edit it without having
to click on a link like you usually do now. I think this is going to be a huge help for
teams because it makes the workflow much smoother. Another exiting aspect of Loop is the AI copilot.
It's not available for me yet, but it looks great and could be as good or even better than Notion's
AI integration. It seems like it's going to be a mix of ChatGPT-like conversational experience
and conventional slash menu AI integration. But even now, if you use it on Microsoft Edge,
you can use the new Bing to ask AI to rewrite, revise or whatever you want with your writing.
And actually another one of my favourite features is its proof reading. It's like Grammarly. As you
write, it underlines all the errors and parts that can be improved. And you can tweak how
it corrects your writing like the tone and vocabulary depending on what you're writing.
By the way, Loop mobile app is also in development. It's still in beta and only
a limited number of people can try it. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them, so I
don't really know much about it yet. But I assume it's far from how good Notion's mobile app is.
There's definitely a huge gap between Notion and Microsoft Loop now. Notion
is an incredibly powerful and versatile tool with a massive fan base. But at the same time,
Loop seems very exciting too especially with the Loop components feature. With
more updates and polish, I can see more companies and teams adapting it.
Okay, thank you so much for watching! I'll leave the link to Microsoft
Loop so you can try it yourself. Cool, thanks. See you next time.