so Microsoft Loop introduced their public preview last week and it went off with the
bang a lot of people in the space interested in what Microsoft Loop can offer now in this
video we're actually going to be doing a full tutorial about how Microsoft Loop operates I'm
going to give you insights into how to start creating a workspace page and component and
giving you a bit of an overview and this might be great for those who are thinking is this right
for me and whether it's suitable for you and your team before we begin the administration
setups of loop you probably want to refer to content from Daryl from Daryl as a service
which will be linked below and Matt munslow if you want some help with Microsoft specific
Administration setups I'm giving my opinion as somebody who is review notion for probably six
or seven years now and is very interested in how this new Microsoft product will evolve so before
we begin my name is Francesca Alessio and welcome to keep productive if you're interested subscribe
below so here we are with Microsoft Loop and one of the things from the get-go is that you've got
three core areas workspaces pages and components and I want to go through them all and give you
an idea of how this account really operates this might be like a 101 for a lot of people
but it will help to work out whether it's right for a new from a features perspective as well
so as you can see here on the screen good morning this is my area where I can see my
workspaces workspace is essential at projects you can create a workspace for a new project or
you can create a workspace for a new area it's really up to you on how you structure that and
obviously that's something to get going maybe you want to start an entire company from it
but that's just a preference really from here you can modify the information that's on each of the
workspaces by favoriting it renaming and styling it styling it is very simply changing cover colors
and checking whose members as well as deleting it here so in this case if I went ahead and deleted
this it would disappear from my workspaces and I can view this as a list very simply
you can see your favorites here but what I'm going to do is show you how to create a new workspace
but then dive into one that I've just created to make it a little bit easier so creating a new
workspace is is fairly simple you can add an icon title invite people and change the cover photo
now in order to do this I'm just going to just demonstrate workspace B and give it an icon and
you can see that it's very simply structured now this is a fig picture in Microsoft called jump
start and it's pretty impressive because what it does is it scans through all of your Microsoft 365
documents and exp anything you've got in Microsoft um 365 and it will make suggestions based on that
using AI which is really cool you can actually prompt it with keywords to really refine that
which is very cool and this I will demonstrate a screen because I don't have any demonstrations
but I do have a piece of content that might be able to bring in so you can not only just bring
in Loop stuff you notice this is a loop thing because it's got the loop logo attached to it but
you can also bring in things like Word documents onenotes OneDrive etc etc so once you create that
I'm just going to go backwards it's going to land a little bit like this but the difference is I've
gone ahead and created a new area a new page loot pages are essentially like notion Pages like most
pages in Confluence and most other applications it's pretty basic in terms of like it's like a
new opening a new page in a notebook and what I've done here is I've added an icon a cover you can
add covers up in here and what's nice is they have a nice Gallery they don't have an extension like
um splasher and thing and I've added a title and I've started adding some details now I'm
not going to go into The Heading of a formats you can edit text using this headings formats and even
go into indenting and heading and lists and bullet points and checklists they're the very basic stuff
what I'm actually going to show you is the slash command and the app mention to help you get an
idea of what this truly can do as Microsoft Loop so if you want to go ahead and create anything
minus a page because you can't create a page from this drop down is basically from here you
can access your basic form to formatting options you can create a table which is almost the only
component per se of the experience that is just sort of a very something you would know and love
templates you can access so these are just tables that are currently just reformatted for better
practice and you can communicate with people for example like at mention somebody pick an emoji
add a date add a label and add images it's very simple and basic they do have some options like
divider and checklist as well if you want to start allocating that off so obviously there's a real
element here that is different it's co-pilot and co-pilot is essentially much like the genitive AI
stuff that we've seen at the moment if you haven't seen them do check out more videos here on this
channel but you can start using it to um utilize the AI last time I tested this because it was in
preview I was having some problems and at the time I think it was to do with the open AI stuff so I'm
going to try it now if you want to see my full video on co-pilot which is Microsoft 365's new
experience that's probably going to help you a lot more and I'll make sure that Steve does a
nice preview of it on the screen right now as I'm talking but you can do stuff like create your list
of the best venues in France for this event I don't think it will work let's see but what it
normally do is it spout out um the ability to be there we go um for Francesco in France let's see
um and what it will do is actually spout out that um in practicality I'm actually
not getting much luck with it the last couple of days but again it's probably due to the open AI
outages that I have been where everyone's been experiencing so co-pilot essentially
is going to work now I'll probably do a full separate video so make sure you're subscribed
um we'll talk about co-pilot more often but it's there within your experience now before we move
on to the actual component element to create Pages you go up here and you can not just create a page
we can create a link so if you've got something in Trello got something in Evernote that you want
to be able to link in and have that as an easily bookmarkable thing then you can have it up there
but any page you create I created one and I needed to Nest it within this one for it to be part of
that page if that makes sense you can see up here the breadcrumbs of that so this is level this is
workspaces level one level two and it's giving you an idea of the structure of the account now
with any page you can see yourself editing it and multiple people will pop up and if you've got a a
nice uh profile photo it will show that so that's nothing to be worried about the other aspect as
well is if you app mention things you cannot mention at the moment files and people so I can
bring in other people and other loop components or files that have in my Microsoft account now
if I did have something in particular I wanted to highlight I could utilize this commenting function
so I could leave a comment and the comment appears in line in full bleed which is quite nice but also
can be quite disruptive in a way because you're so like oh it's there but actually
at the same time resolving them or deleting them sort of makes it more obvious when you're trying
to edit content it's not like nestled away too much but notifications will pop up here
so you can see any unread notifications and be able to make sure you get them
so let's get on to the good bit let's create a table and show you what a table looks like
so I'm going to press slash command and type in table now this is really simplistic there's a few
things you need to note here it's not as advanced as something like notion databases at the moment
but it does offer some basic functionality that converts into something more exciting
so you can see here that um I can go ahead and create the loop component if I want to from
scratch but here I can use basic sorting and sorting can just be based on the columns and
whether they're ascending or descending I can hide a column if I do want to which is quite
handy for lots of information and I can expand the table across the full width of the page
now what's neat is I would say this is quite you can see it's quite actually quite responsive
there's no issues with this database I can actually change the type of the column there's
very basic structures like that like number date person voting and label at the moment so you can
actually create a set of labels in a label group so label group could be you know like we could
have the Bento priorities as our concept that we created the large medium and small
and you can utilize Bento priorities there so here are my okay this task is large
and I can bring oh I could bring this around so you're starting to see it's actually quite
responsive in terms of how it works and I actually thought I had no issues then with the
I don't actually know how to retitle something this is sad isn't it no there we go rename and I
can put tasks there so you can see that I could say you know uh run event and I could have the
Bento priority there and if I wanted to add a new column I could and I could say this one is
notes and you can start typing in some notes alongside here so you can start to see there
it's got some of the basic formattings of being a table but nothing too hideously advanced you
can change the column type at any point you can insert stuff a column to left and column
to right and row below and you can sort the descending and ascending based on a certain
column but that's really it it's quite simplistic as a structured table but this is where it sort
of turned into a different experience is say I have my table here and I want to create it into
a loop component you can see that there's sort of like a weird magician thing pops over the top and
anything I add so if I was like event task list and I can say this is the task list for the event
the loop component becomes live and I can copy that component in the top right hand corner
and naturally I can start utilizing it and because that's something called dot fluid
it's still part of the fluid framework I can and Steve can show this on screen our editor
it can start being pasted into multiple locations like teams Outlook and things like that
and what the difference is is from here people can actually modify the information and and be able to
re in react with it in real time and that's really nice because it's a great example of collaboration
and I want to show you we've got another workspace so if I go command J and a mixture I'm on the page
it's come it's shift a and I go to the fourth goals for this one which is in another workspace
here we go and you can see some of the other examples of how like the like the people in the
creative Creator Academy or create a loop Creator program you can see that they've started adding
end dates and blockers and what tasks to do um but there was actually some Loop components that
were being shared so you can see see who has access to them and you can see who has that
system inside and outside the organization so these Loop components can be traced across where
these locations are like okay where is meeting times being shared can I copy this component and
you can go in the top right hand corner actually enable and embed the loop component into other
supported 365 accounts so this is really neat in terms of taking your experience here a little bit
further and you can see say it was another person you see them interacting in real time in it which
is really neat um so that also operates in teams and things like that so aside from that you can
actually go a bit further with it so if you were to take advantage of the templates that they've
built for a task list there are these task lists that live outside the tables they sort of look
like tables they operate similar to tables but they aren't quite table sitting at that formal
structure here so you can naturally utilize some of their templates they've got for that
and voting for example utilizes the same format but takes into Advantage the voting ability
inside of the column type and you can start to see okay you can start to vote for them and finally
you could go ahead and utilize the progress tracker and that essentially is one I showed
you a moment ago that gets you started with that so aside from that you've got the ability to add
a date so you can just add a date anywhere and it will essentially allow sort of prompts on
that area and it will give you a notification as well which is very nice very very helpful
you can add a label so for example you could be you could just put the entire thing as progress
completed that I think makes the entire page associative to this certain part of
the process so if you're trying to get a bit of a document approved that you were like writing
a blog post or something or a press release then that's something you could put at the top
and uh and that might help the team to be able to go okay yeah let's see what the overall elements
are of this and okay it's for tomorrow and then it's actually completed already in advance
so you can start to see how that's formulating and how that's structuring up in the top right
corner you can see the version history and you can restore certain versions of it which you typically
expect with these sort of things as I said there's settings this is a neat area so what you've got
here is ideas that can be private or shared and essentially what you can do is utilize them to not
make them formalized yet and not make them part of the workspace that is living here with the pages
Etc so that's something great for taking advantage of stuff you can create sub Pages
here you can actually share the page and you can view stuff as either hierarchy or activity based
swapping accounts can easily be done here and creating a new one there and seeing
any recent stuff pop up is really easy through this left-hand side
so I think all in all that is Loop and Microsoft Loop and as you can see from this video if you're
making the decision on this and some of the more formulated options it's probably not where it
wants to be right now Microsoft Loop is is in terms of its product not near notion it hasn't
got a lot of the functionality hasn't got the integration has got the front Brilliance of what
notion has it's very much an MVP of what could be coming but it does have Loop components which is
something that takes the account a lot further especially when you're trying to collaborate in
real time it's great for those who are already in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and it's great
for those who are wanting to collaborate better and that haven't tried things like notion and
probably are looking to do that and collaborate in a more systematic way so that was an overview
of Microsoft Loop a full tutorial please let me know if you have any questions and hopefully it
gave you an idea of how how this works it gives you more of a whether this is right for you do
remember this is a public preview so with all of these types of things I've reviewed many many apps
um they are still early days so this is going to evolve and this is going to change so that's
definitely a good thing but of course just make sure you note it when you're looking at
it but again I said Daryl was a service and Matt munslow both great Microsoft creators on YouTube
I highly recommend checking the both out because it will give you more depth in structuring your
Microsoft Loop account and taking advantage of loop components thank you very much folks
I really hope this helped please let me know if you have any questions and I look forward
to seeing you in a future video Cheerio and do make sure to subscribe everyone bye
thank you