OneDrive gives you one place to store, share, and sync your work or school files. As part of your organization’s Office 365 subscription, you can save your files in OneDrive and then work with them from almost any device. Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account, so you can:

• Upload files from your PC or Mac.
• Share files with others.
• Give others permission to edit files and work on them at the same time.
• Get to your files from anywhere, on your computer, tablet, or phone.
• Sync OneDrive to your PC or Mac, so you can access your files even when you’re offline.

Why Use OneDrive?

Still not sure why OneDrive is such a great tool?

You have just finished writing a newsletter, but you need to get 3 other teachers to add some content specific to their classes, and you want the head teacher to do an overall editorial check. How do you currently achieve this?

Most likely you e-mail each of your colleagues with a copy of the newsletter, and ask them to check and add content as required. Each of them downloads and saves a copy of that newsletter somewhere on the schools network, then reads it and either updates that new copy and sends it back to you, or just notes down the information and changes they want to make you aware of and e-mails them back separately.

You then get 4 e-mails back and have to sort through all the information they contain before copying and pasting the appropriate information back into your master copy, hoping you don’t make any mistakes as you do it. And with that done your newsletter is ready to go.

You might delete the e-mails you got back from each or your colleagues or you might leave them cluttering up your inbox. It is unlikely anyone will delete the multiple copies of the newsletter that were created on the school network as part of that process.

How can OneDrive help?

You finish writing the original draft of your newsletter and save it in OneDrive. You select the file and click share. You select the four colleagues you want to contribute, type a quick message telling them what to do and click send.

They each get an e-mail with a link to the newsletter shared in OneDrive. They click the link, the newsletter opens and they edit it directly – even at the same time as each other!

When finished they let you know, and you just publish that single original, but now updated, newsletter. No cutting and pasting. No chance of new mistakes. And only ever just the single master document. Quicker. Easier. Better.

Not Forgetting…

So long as you have an internet connection, all of this could have been done from any device, any place, any time. That’s what makes Office 365 so great. And OneDrive is a really good place to start to learn that you can do so much more with Office 365 than just send e-mail.

Learn More About OneDrive

If you want to learn how you might make better use of OneDrive, then please take a look at our **OneDrive – An Introduction article. This will show you how to get started with OneDrive, and point you to other articles that will help you to learn how to do even more.