This month, I’d like to share with you some great tools and resources that you can leverage to help drive adoption with your users. These tools provide users with the resources they need to build the skillsets needed to be successful while providing you with the insights you need to track adoption.

Microsoft 365

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So how can we help bring your vision of the world’s productivity cloud—Microsoft 365—to life?

Step 1: Get industry-specific guidelines with the Productivity Library

Start with understanding how Microsoft 365 can improve productivity in your specific role or industry using scenarios and best practices with the Productivity Library. The Productivity Library is available for a wide range of industries including financial services, retail, and healthcare and gets granular for roles like operations, sales, and human resources.

Step 2: Develop a plan with the Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide

The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide helps you to not just identify and prioritize key scenarios, but also helps you understand how to best build and launch your adoption plan with your stakeholders. The Microsoft 365 Adoption Guide will help you drive business value by showing you how to monitor and track adoption and usage.

Step 3: Create your advocates and champions

When you’re ready to start training your users, we recommend leveraging the power of the Office 365 Champions program. This program is designed to help you create a circle of influence for those early adopters or go-to people in your organization and empower them to become your Office 365 Champions. This program provides support and resources to help these users find more efficient way to tackle everyday tasks and then share those learnings with their peers.

Step 4: Build your own learning portal

Did you know you can build a custom training portal with just a few clicks? Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways is a customizable, on-demand learning solution designed to increase usage and adoption of Microsoft 365 services in your organization. This includes on-demand custom training, SharePoint Online portal provisioning, and straightforward steps to provision, customize, and share your new portal with users.

Step 5: Track users progress

Once you implement some of these learning resources you’ll need some tools to help you to track your software adoption progress. The new Microsoft Productivity Score—currently in private preview—will provide you with visibility into how your organization works, insights that identify where you can enable improved experiences so people can reach their goals, and actions to update skills and systems so everyone can do their best work.

For companies who want to help their employees better understand how they spend their time and guide them to better work habits and team norms, we encourage you to turn on MyAnalytics. This tool helps users improve their focus, wellbeing, network, and collaboration.

MyAnalytics is available to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise and Business suite users.

Finally, for a top-down view, we offer Workplace Analytics. Workplace Analytics provides more advanced tools to discover and analyze the business impact of the way people work and help drive change through MyAnalytics. It gives you a view into collaboration patterns that empowers organizations to act with agility, improve employee experience, and sharpen customer focus.

Workplace Analytics is available as a Microsoft 365 add-on service.

Check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast

To help you better understand why Microsoft 365 is the world’s productivity cloud, I encourage you to check out the Microsoft 365 Knowledge podcast. Hosted by veteran IT blogger Paul Thurrott and myself, this podcast series digs into the features and functionality across the products that make up Microsoft 365. We also share real-world tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the product. The first two episodes are available on demand.

Every company’s path to digital transformation is different. Over the next few months we’ll bring you more resources, as well as interviews with organizations who share their tips and secrets on their own successful transformations and their learnings from these projects on how they harnessed the transformative power of Microsoft 365—the world’s productivity cloud.

The post 5 steps for boosting your digital transformation with Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Today, we’re excited to announce we’re working with Nasdaq and Refinitiv to pull current financial information for the full range of U.S. exchange-listed equities, including stocks on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the world’s largest exchange company, and from Refinitiv, one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, right into the Excel Stocks Data Type.

The Stocks Data Type turns Excel into a more robust tool for tracking personal investments, enabling you to track the latest stock prices, trading volume, and other financial information without leaving Excel to search outside sources. Now with trusted, real-time data from Nasdaq and Refinitiv, this becomes even better. Stocks in Excel now expands financial data to include bitcoin, bonds, international currencies, extended-hours pricing information and information about the company, like industry and company description, in addition to other previously available data like mutual funds and stock indexes, such as the Nasdaq Composite, Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and more.

“Expanding the reach of real-time market data is essential to making markets more accessible,” said Oliver Albers, Senior Vice President and Head of Strategic Partnerships for Nasdaq’s Global Information Services. “Our collaboration with Microsoft is a significant step towards bringing important market information to individual investors. Microsoft’s focus on empowering individuals aligns perfectly with our mission to make financial markets more inclusive.”

“Anyone with an interest in financial information needs quick, reliable data to navigate today’s complex and fast-moving global markets,” said Brennan Carley, Global Head of Enterprise at Refinitiv. “Refinitiv has many years’ experience in delivering data to financial professionals within Microsoft Excel and we are now delighted to give everyday investors access to these capabilities via our partnership with Microsoft.”

To understand more deeply how Stocks in Excel works, let’s look at the Microsoft stock. When you type in MSFT and click Stocks, Excel recognizes it as a stock and gives you an option to convert it into a rich entity linked with many properties of related information, including real-time attributes such as Price, Change, Last trade time, 52-week high/low, and other pricing information. You can choose to capture these attributes in different cells or use them directly in formulas. Recently updated data cards provide a better experience for Excel users working with such information allowing a quick preview of available categories. Imagine adding a list of ticker symbols from your stock portfolio in one column and having Excel provide the price and your daily gains or losses, refreshed with the click of a button.

By bringing together the power of Microsoft-backed data services with highly trusted sources of market information like Nasdaq and Refinitiv, we’re helping everyday investors like you access the same data as the market sees, enabling better financial literacy. And this is just the beginning: soon, you’ll be able to see historical data and automatically update the prices every few minutes.

We’re excited to continue our journey to continually improve Excel to help you get the most out of your data. Start tracking your personal investments using Excel for Office 365 today and this template to help you track your investments.

The post Microsoft, Nasdaq, and Refinitiv empower everyday investors with real-time data and insights in Excel appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.