so today's video we're diving into microsoft outlook boards which is a feature within
microsoft that you can customize to include a range of different things from your calendar
to your upcoming tasks to even in the future some of the live components that microsoft
will be adding very soon now today's video is hosted by matt who is from collaboration coach
i highly recommend checking out his channel if you want to dive into microsoft it is fantastic
content there and he has a really great manner in explaining everything so do check out both
collaboration coach and keep productive if you're new here so without further ado a guide to getting
started with outlook boards hi everyone my name's matt and i'm the host of the collaboration coach
youtube channel thank you so much for having me back on keep productive it's always a pleasure
and this time we're going to look at outlook boards boards are a feature of outlook on the
web and they are a personal productivity app that integrates with your office 365 mailbox and with
many of the other microsoft apps like onedrive and to do so in this video i'm going to give you
an overview of what boards are why they're useful and hopefully get you using them too
to get started you need to open outlook on the web from the browser and go to your calendar
go to your view menu on the right hand side pull it down and choose board
when you land on the board for the first time you'll see the calendar
tasks and notes widgets these are the key ones as they integrate with outlook onenote and to do
and you can add others too we'll look at those later but let's start with the calendar
as you'd expect the calendar widget pulls information from your mailbox
i can move around the calendar view by paging through the weeks and the months
and i can change the view to agenda for days weekly and monthly i can add new events
and i can manage existing ones
i can also add other calendars to this view
if i add sarah's calendar for example i'll see her meetings on this view too
each widget on the board can be resized and moved around on the calendar if i
choose the ellipsis here and choose to resize it gives me some handles that i can move around
or i can just use the arrows
when i move the calendar you can see a grid lights up behind it and then the widget
will snap to that grid i can even drop the calendar on top of other widgets on the board
i can add new widgets to the board using the add to board drop down
i get a list of things to add and they get placed on the board
and i can move them around and resize them as soon as they're there
i can select them which gives me some more options on this ribbon up here
and i can choose the ellipsis to get that same list of options
so there are all sorts of widgets like weather
clocks
and goals looks cool because you can set a due date for the goal and it adds it to your calendar
and i can obviously remove any of the widgets i add as well
so if you like what you've seen so far then please check out our youtube channel collaboration coach
we post videos like this one every week on all the microsoft apps and services like outlook
teams sharepoint and many many more we've got hundreds of videos there now so i'm sure you'll
find something that you're interested in make sure you check us out over at collaboration coach
okay so now back to boards and let's have a look at zooming because i think this is
one of the coolest features so i can zoom in and out of the board using the magnifying glass here
and i can reset the zoom to take me back to the original view i can move the board around
by clicking and dragging and this window in the bottom right shows me where on the board i am
and i seem to be able to move as far away as i like so the board seems to be infinite i haven't
been able to find the edge anyway but let's assume it's infinite because i love that idea because it
means that i can have different areas on the same board for the different things that i'm working on
and i can move around and zoom in when i need them for example i've got a green set of widgets
for one project on one part of the board and a blue set for another project over here you can
also lock the view with this toggle and when you do that nothing can be moved or resized a
new feature just rolling out now is the ability to create new boards so the board that you start with
is your default board and if you come to the top right corner here and choose the drop down you can
go to the board option and choose this arrow here which will show that we're on the default board
which is signified by a tick and we can choose new board and that will ask us to name our board
and once it's created you'll see the standard widgets calendar tasks and notes and you see
we're on matt's board and we can switch back to the original default board anytime we like
boards have one note integration too i can use the notes widget here to capture stuff so i could just
start typing or paste something in or add an image whatever i add to my board it will show up in the
onenote feed the onenote feed lets me reuse the things i add as notes when i'm using email or
calendar and the onenote app for example if i add an image into this note widget on my board
i can also see if i pull down the onenote feed panel with this button here
what's in the feed can also be used in an email so when i'm writing a message
i can pull up the feed in the same way and drag that image into my message
and when i'm in onenote i can pull up the feed again and drag things out of it onto my pages
so now let's look at the tasks integration from this task widget i can see and add tasks
and these tasks are pulled from microsoft's to-do app and any emails that i flag in outlook
i can see the default my task list and also my day and any flagged email from this drop down here
and i can flag a task as important and i can also right click it and edit the task and do
things like add a reminder or set the due date emails i flag in outlook will show up here in the
flagged emails list and any tasks i add with the to do app will also show up here in the
task list and if i add tasks to the board they'll also show up in to do
i can add them to my day if that's what i'm going to work on that day
plus i can drag tasks from the task list straight onto my calendar to schedule some time to get
that work done i can always complete the task when i've done the work and that will remove
it from the list and finally collections can bring all your widgets together as one
you can add a collection to your board and name it and this is going to be my project collection
you can add a color and a due date and then you just add all the widgets to the collection by
dragging them onto it so i'm going to drag all my project related widgets onto this collection
when you resize a widget the collection will resize with it
and now i can move the collection around the board as one
so that's how you get started with outlook boards for personal productivity i think it's
really good for pulling all sorts of separate apps together so they're all in one place
it's totally customizable so it can be anything you want and there's plenty of
board space to have different work areas and you can create your own new boards
so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time
you