Office 365 For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Introduction

Over the last few years, a massive shift has occurred at Microsoft. Microsoft has transitioned from selling software that large customers install locally to a company that sells cloud-based services. Office 365 is just such a service. Microsoft is not the only company that has done this. Just about every traditional software company now offers its product over the Internet as a service.

As a user in this new service-based software world, you have all the power. You can start using advanced software in a matter of minutes that only a decade ago was reserved for the largest corporate entities with dedicated teams and huge budgets. You can decide to start using software one day and decide to stop using it — and stop paying for it — a week later. You can add more user licenses to your subscription or remove them when you don’t need them. In short, it is a great time to be a consumer of software.

About This Book

This book is about understanding Microsoft Office 365 at a fairly high level. It includes some of the administrative tasks of setting up and managing the software along with using some of the most well-known applications. The Office 365 product consists of many applications, and the book walks you through some of the major ones.

Microsoft is constantly adding new features and products to Office 365 so this book should be used as a base to get started. You can then explore further on your own. In fact, in most cases there are books dedicated to each app in particular. ...