As a Dominican student, staff and/or faculty member, you have access to the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. Many of the following apps are available for use by all, while a few must be specifically requested.
LinkedIn Learn provides training on how to use these applications. The Support Center ONLY provides assistance with downloading and accessing the applications. If you are having difficulties accessing or downloading the applications, then please click here.
Standard Office 365 Apps
The Office 365 suite of desktop applications can be installed on your personal computer, as well as iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices.
Outlook
- Outlook is an email client and personal information manager developed to streamline communication within organizations like DU. Its primary function is to facilitate sending, receiving, and organizing emails within Outlook Mail; use folders, categories, and flags to keep your inbox organized, and automate organization with customizable rules and alerts. Outlook Calendar, Outlook People, Outlook Groups, and Outlook To Do let you manage your calendar, contacts, contact groups, and tasks, all while just a click away from your inbox.
Word
- Word is a powerful word processing program that allows DU community members to create professional-quality documents, reports, letters, and resumes. It offers a wide range of features supporting editing and document design, lending itself best to documents needing clean formatting and a print-ready layout. A Word document's structure is comparably more rigid than that of a OneNote page, as Word trades off flexibility for precision and reproducibility.
Excel
- Excel is a spreadsheet program used worldwide for data organization, analysis, and visualization. It allows users to store and manage information in a structured grid format consisting of a series of rows and columns. Beyond simple data entry, Excel offers powerful tools for performing calculations, analyzing data trends, and automating repetitive tasks. Excel integrates with other Office 365 apps including Word, PowerPoint, and Planner, extending each app's capabilities.\
PowerPoint
- PowerPoint is a presentation program designed for creating slide shows that capture and retain audience attention by minimizing breaks in presentation flow, whether you're presenting in a classroom, at a conference, as a team, or online. It's extensive design options, multimedia integration (video and audio clips), and real-time collaboration features allow individuals and teams of users to build eye-catching, professional-quality presentations with ease. Choose from preset slide templates and themes, or start with a blank presentation to customize every aspect of your slides.
OneDrive
- OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage service that provides a convenient way to store your personal files in one location, such that they can be retrieved from any device with an Internet connection. Files uploaded to your OneDrive are housed in Microsoft's data centers rather than on your device, while you control who can access your files. This arrangement facilitates easy file sharing and collaboration with other OneDrive users. For more information on Microsoft's data protection and privacy policies, start here.
OneNote
- OneNote is a versatile application designed for notetaking, with an information management structure similar to that of a stack of multi-subject notebooks. It allows you to create free-form pages where you can store text, images, and other media. Think of it as your digital backpack in which you can organize information in a flexible way— it's ideal for notetaking, and not as much for writing essays and reports. You can keep pages private or share them with others for real-time collaboration.
Publisher
- Microsoft Publisher is a publishing application primarily used to create professional-quality newsletters, brochures, flyers, posters, calendars, and more. Publisher's features accommodate creative freedom arranging graphical elements in a free-form layout. Publisher features a drag-and-drop interface, allowing for precise manipulation of shapes, lines, images, icons, text boxes, tables, hyperlinks, and more. Users can choose from comprehensive collection of pre-designed templates and pre-formatted components like sidebars, pull quotes, and headings. Publisher integrates with other Office 365 apps including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, extending each app's capabilities.
Access
Teams
- Teams is a team collaboration platform that integrates seamlessly with various Microsoft 365 applications to enhance team communication and productivity. With Teams, members of the DU community can easily connect with each other and pool information resources within a shared digital environment that's conveniently modular in it's construction, similar in function and design to apps like Google Workspace, Slack, and Discord. Anyone in the DU community can create a new Teams group, whether for a one-off short term group project or a long-term collaboration effort.
Forms
- Forms is a basic form builder whose strengths lie in user-friendliness and simplicity. With Forms, you can create interactive surveys, quizzes, and polls, and send invite links for anyone to complete in a web browser— no email sign-in is required, though individual forms can be configured to require respondents access a DU email. In a form's Questions tab, you can edit form contents at any time, even after you've shared it with others and received some responses. In the Responses tab, view real-time response analytics and toggle through submitted form responses.
Visio
- Visio is diagramming tool a designed for creating diagrams of all kinds, including flowcharts, organizational charts, floor plans, network diagrams, UML diagrams, mind maps, and more. Visually appealing and professional, Visio diagrams are constructed piece-by-piece using a wide variety of shapes and connectors. For projects relying on datasets, diagrams can be configured to pull data directly from Excel workbooks and other sources. To get started on a new Visio project, identify which out of the eleven template types will best fit your needs (Basic Diagram, Basic Flowchart, Organizational Chart, Infographic Timeline, Block, Basic Network, Process, Matrix, Venn Diagram, Cycle, Pyramid). Create a blank diagram of the type you identified, or find a suitable pre-filled template of that type to create or preview. Alternatively, create a new blank drawing and start dragging and dropping unbounded.
SharePoint
- SharePoint is collaborative platform that allows members of the DU community to create web-accessible shared spaces, called team sites, dedicated to organizational knowledge and documentation. SharePoint's access control features allow site managers to regulate who has permission to view, edit, and/or administrate their site using email-based authentication. DUConnect, for example, is a SharePoint site internal to Dominican that can only be accessed by DU network account holders, or by others who might be granted special access.
Project
- Microsoft Project is a project management software solution with a particular aim to assist professional project managers with their duties. With it, project managers can efficiently tackle routine tasks— they can develop a schedule, allocate resources, generate reports, track costs, balance a budget, monitor time sheets, and more. Perhaps most crucially, Project facilitates manager-team communication, intra-team collaboration, and team-stakeholder correspondence. Towards that end, Project can be integrated with Teams, Outlook, and Sharepoint, as well as popular 3rd party collaboration platforms such as Trello and JIRA. Later in 2024, Planner for the web will be integrated into Planner, and in 2025, Project 2019's development lifecycle will end. Try out Planner instead, or consider switching over.
Planner
- Microsoft Planner is a teamwork-oriented task management tool that can be used to create Plans, assign tasks, set due dates, and track progress through various visual dashboards. Create Plans from templates (Blank Plan, Simple Plan, Project Management, Software Development, Business Plan, Employee Onboarding) and modify them as you see fit. On the Board tab, task cards are grouped into customizable categories or "buckets", allowing users to (re)arrange tasks based on phases, priorities, or any other relevant criteria. The Grid tab organizes tasks into a column sorted by task attributes, the Charts tab presents visualizations of task-related data, and the Schedule tab places scheduled tasks on a calendar. Planner integrates with other Office 365 apps including Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint, extending each app's capabilities.
Bookings
- Bookings is available upon request to DU faculty and staff only.
- Microsoft Bookings is a web-based tool that manages appointment scheduling. Create customizable meeting types for your personal booking page and share your page directly via link. Or, set up a shared booking page and allow multiple services and team members to be accessed by customers from a single location. For each meeting type you define, you can choose your availability to match your regular work hours as set in Outlook, or define custom availability hours. Bookings also syncs with your Outlook calendar, so you never have to worry about double-booking. For virtual meeting types, a Teams meeting link can be automatically generated and included in the booking confirmation.