I.

Introduction:
Microsoft Office is an office suit of program programs, servers, and services developed
by Microsoft. Being first introduced by Bill Gates with three software including Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, Microsoft Office allow businesses to manage data entry, present
and develop statistical tasks in a convenient way. In 2001, Microsoft develop a
subscription model version of the traditional one, called Microsoft Office 365. With the
same core applications as old version, Office 365 has more outstanding program as
Outlook, OneNote as well as cloud-based software as a service products for business
environments, such as hosted Exchange Server, Skype for Business Server, and
SharePoint. Besides, Office 365 offers customers with all automatically updated plans
include automatic updates without any additional fee, as opposed to conventional
licenses for these programs—where new versions require purchase of a new license.
With the benefit of cloud data, users can access it everywhere, every time, on any
devices that they want. Cut short or in 1 para
In addition to the special Office 365 licenses extended to education and government
organizations, there are many industries finding Office 365 to be the best productivity
and cloud solution available. Eight years after its launch, Microsoft Office 365 reached
180 million monthly active users, meaning gain to about 4,16 million users since the last
number (155 million) was reported in November 2018 (Tony 2019). Based on a survey
from Gartner, approximately 78% of enterprises used or planned to use Office 365.
According to Bitglass, usage of Office 365 globally in 2016 was around 34%. That
number grew to 56% by Q3 of last year. This means Office 365 users now make up
over half of the 81% of total organizations who have made the shift to cloud
services(2019). According to the statistics provided by Statista, United State ranked first
with under 500 thousand company in terms of number of Office users worldwide of
March 2019.
This report provides a clear overview of Microsoft Office 365, along with the three most
commonly used applications. Besides, the difference from Google G Suite and its
impact on RMIT business and its student life will also be analysed.( explain the structure
of the assign what this report will have)
II. Analysis:
“When it comes to office automation, the first thing that comes to mind is Microsoft
Office. One cannot imagine a Windows-based computer without a local copy of Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint.” according to TheWindowsClub (n.d). Specifically, organization
can have the benefit of the Microsoft Office 365’s main advantages: communication
tool, scheduling method,  and effective tool for teaching and studying. And since RMIT -
where the teaching and  studying takes place, it is close to the teachers and students’
daily activities, and at RMIT, these apps are fully taken advantage for the purpose of
enhancing the teaching and studying quality. Therefore, this report will go in-depth with
the benefits that these apps bring back to RMIT’s students as well as teachers.
a/The benefit of Office 365 to RMIT’s students and teachers:
1. Convenient and time-saving communication tool:
Outlook from Office 365 is famous for providing customers with an easy-to-use
communication tool with the flexibility and adaptability with many devices(Johnson, n.d).
Therefore, RMIT has fully taken advantage of this benefit to send the message fast and
easily to students or notice them about the upcoming events or any alteration about the
events or tuition fees in a second. Besides, there is a significant influence of Outlook in
the communicating between students and their lectures when they can discuss with the
lectures about the lessons outside the classroom anywhere, anytime. Moreover, the
students can work together about their group project online via Outlook since they have
different timetables and regard of different distance, it will be difficult for them to arrange
an offline meeting which includes every single member in the group.

2. An effective tool for teaching and studying purposes:

 “The keys to the success of Microsoft Office are the adaptability and flexibility of its
three main applications, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.” according to Shpak(2019) and
since they can fully meet the daily demand in the teaching and studying environment,
they are essential to RMIT’s teachers and students . According to W.Bell (n.d),
“Microsoft PowerPoint is an easy program to use and a powerful tool for giving a
presentation.”. Therefore, teachers in many universities include RMIT are applying
Powerpoint in their teaching since it has the visual impact which can help to attract the
students attention by images, videos and audios and help the teacher to be more
improvisational and interactive with the students, hence, this will help students to gain
more knowledge and more accessible to the content of the lessons (W.Bell, n.d). And
since students’ studying significantly involved  in writing and storing documents, the
linking with OneDrive of Office 365 helps student to store their documents to a cloud-
based storage called OneDrive and do not have to worry when they forgot their PCs at
home and continuously working on any computer on the condition that they have the
Office 265 account.
 
 3. Efficient timetabling methods:
“Microsoft Outlook Calendar is an excellent tool for maintaining and scheduling
meetings, activities, events, and tasks.” according to Sherweb(2018). And since
studying and working in RMIT involve hundreds of events and team-meetings, Outlook
Calendar provides users with many benefits that can help users to easily schedule their
timetables. They can use Outlook to set up team or group work schedule and all the
notification about this event will automatically send to each and every member of the
group via email, contacts or so on(Microsoft, n.d). And since team meeting is important
to teamwork, RMIT has provided students with many meeting rooms, yet, limited of
number, so that via Outlook Calendar, students can book the meeting roms’ location
and time that are suitable to their timetable in advance, which is much faster and
convenient.

b/ What are the top three most commonly used applications in Microsoft Office
365 and their main functionalities?

Figure 1. Office 365 adoption—usage by application in Q2 2016.

Adapted from: McAfee 2016 

Figure 1 shows the adoption of Microsoft Office 365 applications across industries. As
can be seen, the most used application in Microsoft Office 365 in 2019 from
organisations around the world is OneDrive for Business, which accounts for 79.1%
(McAfee 2016). Exchange Online takes second place of 66.9% and thirdly SharePoint
with 35.3%.
OneDrive for business
To begin with, the original OneDrive is the Microsoft cloud service where you can easily
log in via Outlook, Hotmail, live account (Withee; Withee; Reed n.d.) and able to store
your files securely and could be easily accessed from anywhere on every of your
devices, thus it is possible to share your files with other users (Office Support 2019).
Nevertheless you only have 5 Gigabytes of online storage, whereas 1 Terabyte is
available if you log in using an account provided by your organisation or school (Office
Support 2019). Your account is managed by your organisation and allow you to share
your work with colleagues (Office Support 2019), so as to edit documents together in
real time with Office Online (States Archive of North Carolina 2015). Microsoft Office
software such as Word, Exel, PowerPoint will come with OneDrive as a business
package so different users could edit in different places at different time zones (States
Archive of North Carolina 2015).
Exchange online:
First of all, Microsoft Exchange online is an email server. This application is a cloud-
based platform that users can perform successful messaging with secured system
(‘What is Microsoft Exchange?’ 2016). Moreover, Exchange online contains useful
applications such as “email, calendar, contacts, and tasks from PCs, the web, and
mobile devices” (Microsoft Docs 2019, para. 2). Exchange online cooperates with Active
Directory which allows administrators to implement group policies, tools and control the
features within their organisation (Microsoft Docs 2019). One of the many user-friendly
features of Exchange Online is Data loss prevention warn users before accidentally
sending sensitive information to unauthorised characters. Furthermore, this app protect
the user from malware, spam mails, by always having security expert teams on guard
(Office Products 2019).
Skype
Skype is a software that enables people from all over the world to contact each other
through phone calls, video calls or chat messages via devices that have webcam or
camera lens such as a computer or even more convenient, a phone (‘What is Skype?’
n.d.). This useful function of Skype is able to work well due to the presence of VoIP
(Voice over Internet Protocol) service. Not only supporting one-to-one video call but
Skype also offers group call function (Foulk 2018). Moreover, Skype shows its Social
care by providing live subtitling which read the words that are being said (Unuth 2019).
Not only used for calling and messaging services, Skype is also known for its ability to
share files and screen sharing. Screen sharing allows users to record live videos on
their own screen and share them with others in order to demonstrate instructions, for
instance (GCFGlobal 2019.).

c/ Compare Microsoft Office 365 and G suit 

Both Office 365 and G Suite allow you to: (design nice diagram)
 Perform business tasks by variety of productive tools which are offline or
online applications to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations.
 Contact online with team members by doing task on web or video
conferencing.
 Provide cloud storage instead of computer storage.
However, there are factors that Microsoft Office 365 and Google G suite different from
each other below:  

  Microsoft Office 365 Google G suite 

  Available online and offline  Only available online
Availability  Better use in desktop, less  Better use in both desktop
use on mobile and mobile

   $5 to $12.5 per month  $4.2 to $25 per month

Price

 Outlook, One Note, One  Gmail, Google Drive,

Application drive, Access, Sharepoint, Google Docs, Sheets,
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Slides, Forms, Sites,
Microsoft Teams. Calendar, Hangouts, etc.

   

 1TB for Business  (One  30GB or Unlimited for

Cloud storage Drive) business (Google Drive)

Collaboration Able to send links in Words, Excels Well known as collaboration and
and email a Power points simple sharing tools.

Link expiration is available (greater Link expiration is not available 

of level control)
 https://fitsmallbusiness.com/g-suite-vs-office-365/?fst=527747#:~:targetText=G
%20Suite%20offers%20Google%20apps,for%20businesses%20with%20different
%20needs.

https://www.stylefactoryproductions.com/blog/office-365-vs-google-apps

Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets comparison particularly: 

 Providing professional spreadsheet for in-depth data analysis
 Supplying various mathematical calculations for logical issues
 Be made in realtime together, leave comments and connect with other
applications

  Microsoft Excel Google sheets

 1985: version 1.0 for  2006: first Google

Published Macintosh Spreadsheets version
time  1992: ‘popular’ version with released
usable features  2012: renamed to Google
Sheets

 Widely used  Newly used

Featuring  Better statistical analysis  Limit statistical analysis and
and visualization with many visualization
formulas

 Not a favorable tool   Preferred tool

Collaboration

 Unlimited storage for large  Limitation storage, the more

Storage amounts of data data increase, the slower it is

 More complex to use  Simple to use

Use

 Manually for desktop  Automatically

Saving version

 Payment required  Payment or free for small

Fees business
  Suitable for large  For whom need effective
User organizations collaboration and simply jobs

https://tallyfy.com/microsoft-excel-vs-google-sheets/#:~:targetText=Google%20Sheets
%20allows%20multiple%20users,sheets%20in%20its%20collaboration%20capabilities

III. Reflection: LINK WITH the function in the ANALYSIS

a/Benefit in the students’ studying:  

1. Increase student’s productivity:

Since Microsoft Office 365 is applied to university, it provides convenient and

advantageous applications for students in daily assignments such as Excel, Power
Point, Access, Word … Nowadays, most of the software operates only when being
connected to the Internet. However, these applications are able to work in an
environment having no Internet connection. They can be accessed by many different
equipments such as personal computers, laptops, smartphones, …  Thus, students can
use Microsoft Office 365 applications anytime, anywhere and by anything which helps
their workflow are uninterrupted. Office 365 enhances student's productivity not only in
education but also in other aspects of lives. Students can apply these applications in
their extracurricular activities or after-class clubs. Moreover, we are living in 4.0
technology revolution so that technology is necessary and important for everyone.
Thanks to Office 365, students can get accustomed to rapid technological innovation
and work digitally by using its applications. As a result, this maintains the quality in their
performance and achievements.

Especially, the Microsoft Office 365’s application having highest level of usage in RMIT
University is Outlook. In an international environment like RMIT University, there are a
huge number of simultaneous activities and events that cause confusion for students to
remember. So that, Outlook plays an essential role in developing their time
management skills. By Outlook, students can receive, update weekly course information
from lecturers, announcements and reminder for upcoming activities or academic
workshops which includes specific date and time from university. Students can also use
Outlook to book appointments. These functions help students manage their schedule
efficiently.

2. Improve communication and information sharing:

In RMIT University, students are encouraged to work in groups for assignments and
Microsoft Office 365 is considered as an effective tool for group work. Students can use
Office 365 offline for working and online for sharing. Any files of Office 365 can be
created, accessed and edited by different students regardless of time and distance.
Office 365 helps students keep in touch with each other, share information, update
immediately group situation which increase group commitment and performance.

Moreover, Office 365 is fundamental to connection and communication between

lecturers and students. Outlook email is a method for students to ask for support and
interact with lecturers and university. Lecturers also use Outlook to send notifications,
course information and score to students. Connection between lecturers and students
advances thanks to Office 365.  

3. Easy to use:

Although Office 365 has many applications with a great number of excellent functions, it
is not difficult or time-consuming for students to understand and operate due to the
symbols and characters on its interface. Besides, with Office 365, the presentations
become more logical and aesthetic.

b/Recommendations:

First of all, organizing huge amounts of data has always been an indispensable job in
every business. Using data visualization is one of the best ways to illustrate those
statistics. According to Tableau, there are lots of tools and applications to help people
create data visualization and data analysis (Tableau n.d.). However, in Microsoft Office
365, there are only some few of type of data visualization in Excel such as charts, pivot
table… and these form of presentation are quite simple. It would be better if Microsoft
can provide more options or even have new tool that specially use for data visualization
like maps, infographics, matrix, dashboard, bubble cloud… RMIT students mostly use
Microsoft applications in supporting their assignments and presentations and it would be
more approachable if they know how to demonstrate data through images. People’s
eyes are always captured by movements and bright colors. Therefore, it can be
designed to move dots or lines which represent figures or even change colors due to
different circumstances which make arid statistics become more attractive and
understandable. Nevertheless, the price that Microsoft Office 365 offer still the same after
upgrade the system with new data visualization. Although there are many software tools
offer various methods of visualization, it would be nice to have more forms of them add
in Microsoft Office 365. 

Secondly, the key factor for Microsoft to develop is the usability of the system. Microsoft
must improve it based on five attributes which are learnability, memorability, efficiency
of use, errors and subject satisfaction. For RMIT students, Microsoft need to focus more
on how to impress the users in the first time and make it easy to learn and work with. 
For example, in every application, Microsoft should provide a small instruction of simple
methods of how to use that software effectively like a short video to show some popular tools
that everyone must use when using the program. When the students feel Microsoft is
memorable enough, efficiency will show during using it and obviously the improvement
in studying will definitely grow. The users experience are the determinants for the
success of failure of this system since they are the people who decide if it brings they
satisfaction or not. Based on how many times a week or how often students use these
applications, Microsoft will regularly send a survey form through Outlook to seek for
improvement that recommend from RMIT students. Thus, development in usability of
Microsoft Office 365 is a must in order to improve customers pleasure. Interaction
design foundation stated that there are three main outcomes for the usable interface
include easy for the user to become familiar with and competent in, to achieve their
objectives and to recall the interface and how to use it on subsequent visits (Interaction
design foundation n.d.). Microsoft needs to increase their usability in applications for
RMIT student so as to receive back the best outcomes. 
III. Conclusion:
III. References:
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resources’, Tableau, viewed 5 December 2019,
<https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/data-visualization>. 

Interaction design foundation n.d., ‘Usability, Interaction design foundation’, viewed 5

December 2019, <https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/usability>. 

TheWindownsClub n.d, ‘History & Evolution Of Microsoft Office Software’,

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Shpak, S 2019, ‘How Word, Excel & PowerPoint in Microsoft Office Are Used to Support
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V. Appendices: