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Hello, it's Matt and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
In this video we're going to have a look at another feature of the My Analytics service called Insights.
This is an Outlook add-in that uses data captured from your activity in Microsoft 365
and uses it to suggest ways you could manage your email and calendar more effectively.
We're going to look at how it works and how you can use it
for things like preparing for your meetings,
booking time in your calendar to focus,
and something we all like doing - booking time away from work.
From Outlook you'll find the Insights button on the far right hand side of the ribbon.
It's here. And if your ribbon's collapsed like this, you might have to go to the ellipsis
and then choose the Insights button from there.
And once you do that, the pane opens up on the right hand side
and you'll see a list of insights.
We've got them listed here.
And we can click on them now
which will take us through to the Insight information and any other tasks that we can complete to support the insight.
First of all, let's look at Planning your time away.
This insight allows you to plan when you're going to be away from work
and all the other things that you might need to do in order to make that happen.
You can set the dates you're going to be away.
I'm going to set my start date as Wednesday and then you can press "schedule".
What that does is add an out of office appointment to your calendar so people know you're out of office
then it automatically composes a reply.
So this is the email that people will get if they email you during that period.
But you see it's written it all for me based on the dates I added.
What I have to do is press "save" and then I can compose an email to my frequent collaborators.
So these are people I work with most often.
I can hit "compose" and then that will create a new email
and it just lets them know that I'm out of office.
So I can just hit "send" when I'm ready.
The next part of this insight is to analyze which meetings you already have in place.
It's showing me that on one of the days I'm going to be out of office...
...I actually have a couple of meetings scheduled.
It can then send a decline to all the people that were invited to it and cancel these meetings.
So I can either select one or the other or "all", hit the confirm button...
...and now that meeting has been cancelled for me.
So finally the last thing that this insight does is allow you to add focus time.
Focus time is uninterrupted time when you can get your work done
and it's asking me to add time before and after the holiday.
So I'm just going to say yes to both of those, hit the plus button.
I just press "done", and now I've gone through each of the steps in this insight.
So now if I go to the calendar you'll see that the focus time has been added in green here,
you can see before and after, then the actual time I'm going to be away here is added in purple.
The next insight I wanted to look at was "Prepare for your meetings".
When I click on the "prepare for meetings" you can see a list of all the meetings I've been invited to or I've organised,
and you can switch between "organised" and "invited"
and you can see at a glance when the meeting is,
how many people should be attending and how many people are actually attending.
You can see here for example my team meeting.
Three people were invited and only two of them have accepted.
Another thing this insight allows me to do is add preparation time.
So you can see here I've got a one-to-one with Megan at 11 o'clock
and I may need some time to prepare for that so I can put that 15 minutes for example into my diary
to make sure that I block some time to get ready for it.
When I press this button and I switch to my calendar
you'll see it's added in green here some preparation time for that meeting.
Insights can also help me book time in my calendar to focus.
If I choose the "Book time to focus" insight it gives me a list of times during my week
that I could possibly focus
and it's actually looked into my calendar and seen where all the gaps are.
Now you can see these green bars here - these are actually times in my calendar that I've already booked focus
so I could remove them from here if I wanted to, just by pressing the minus button
and I can also add new ones by pressing the plus.
Now every time I do that in my calendar
I'm going to see the insight's already added the focus time that I've chosen.
Another example of insights for email is tracking how many people have opened an email.
You can see here I've sent an email to a bunch of my team mates
and insights has flagged it with this bar here
that says 33 of the people who received it have opened it
and I can click on this "see more insights" link and it will open up the insights bar
and then show me the open rate plus any forwards as well.
Also note here that I can't see who has opened it or who has forwarded it.
It just gives me a high level view of how many people are engaging with the email I sent.
So there you have a quick look at Outlook Insights.
I hope that helps you work smarter and be more productive.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time
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