This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
Do you remember when years ago you copied information onto a floppy disk and took it to a colleague’s workstation? Nowadays it seems crazy to think about this, it’s so easy to send an email and that’s it, but we should pay attention here, because sometimes sending an email to a colleague, waiting for a response, modifying the document, sending it to another colleague and unifying document versions, is as archaic as carrying a floppy disk from one place to another.
Let’s start by defining: What is online collaboration?
It is the use of cloud software and applications to perform a common task among several people on the same document or simultaneously. These applications give us the possibility to work in shared spaces on the Internet or local network with the people we need to perform our work, facilitating our communication with project or task collaborators.
Online collaboration can be done through many cloud platforms such as:
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Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint
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Microsoft Teams
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Microsoft SharePoint
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Google Hangouts
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Google Drive
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Monday
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Asana
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Basecamp
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Process Street
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Among others
How to start in a simple way? With just these 7 steps, we can start with a tool that almost everyone knows, like Microsoft Word:
1. We make sure we have OneDrive on our computer
2. We log in to OneDrive, it’s easy, we just need to open it and enter our username and password.
3. We open our Microsoft Word
4. We save the document in the OneDrive folder we want
5. In the upper right part of the screen, you will find an option called “share”, we click on this
6. We add the email addresses of the people we want to collaborate with
7. We work on the document!
Here you can see the video: How to share a document
The people you shared the document with will have access to it and can all edit in real-time. I forgot to mention that these types of documents are always backed up, therefore, it is one of the safest ways you can find to work.
There are many options to collaborate safely, practically, and in a user-friendly manner, considerably increasing our productivity. I recommend using alternatives so that you can avoid rework, loss of information, time wasted unifying versions, which is as impractical as going back to the floppy disk era.
