The Open University | What is satisfaction: Office 365 for ...

The Open University | What is satisfaction: Office 365 for Free

KAREN FOLEY:

Welcome back to the Student Help Live. In this session, we're going to talk about Office 365. Did you know that you can access Office 365 for free as an OU student? It provides a whole host of useful applications, like Word and PowerPoint, along with an academic email address.

So in this session, I'm joined by Jayne Horne, from our computing help desk, who's going to fill us in on some common gotchas and mistakes so that we can all sign and successfully and make the most of this service. So Jayne, what is Office 365 broadly? What does it, what is included in the package?

JAYNE HORNE:

OK. Yep. Well, as you said, it provides access to your academic email address and the most commonly used Office applications that students use, so Word, PowerPoint. I'm sure everybody's used Word for a few TMAs here and there. There's also Excel and OneNote on there, and one terabyte of online storage via OneDrive. So if you want to save documents and files there, you can do so.

KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. Now, do people need to use Office 365 if they're a student? No?

JAYNE HORNE:

No, if you've got your own Office software that you prefer to use, so you may already have Word, you may already have OpenOffice or LibreOffice, you can continue to use that.

KAREN FOLEY:

Yeah. I love OneNote. I've just started getting into that. It's so useful. And you can like, I have it on my phone and I can sync things to it. It's great fun.

OK. So everyone can use then. How do they access it? What do they need?

JAYNE HORNE:

Yep. So first of all, you need your academic email address, and to, unfortunately, answer a question with a question, people need to know their OUCU, which is their Open University Computer Username.

KAREN FOLEY: OK.

JAYNE HORNE:

So what that is it's normally your initials or zx followed by a few numbers. And quick question, does anybody know what theirs is?

[LAUGHING]

KAREN FOLEY: Well, I think people have signed in to watch today's one with. I know what mine is.

JAYNE HORNE: Fabulous. Well, if anybody doesn't though, it's really easy to find.

KAREN FOLEY: How do you do that?

JAYNE HORNE:

Yep. You sign into Student Home. Then towards the top right hand corner, there's a link Profile.

KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. So we can see that coming up on the screen here, with a big red arrow on it.

JAYNE HORNE:

Yep. So students click that, and then there's a little section that says Contact Details. Your OUCU will be stated in there.

KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant.

JAYNE HORNE: So that forms the first part of your academic email address.

KAREN FOLEY: OK.

JAYNE HORNE: The second part is @ou.ac.uk.

KAREN FOLEY: Right.

JAYNE HORNE:

So one of the very common gotchas for signing in is people were typing @open.ac.uk, which for students won't work for them.

KAREN FOLEY: Right.

JAYNE HORNE:

So with your academic email address, then to actually access the service, you go back to Student Home. On the left hand side of the page, you see a link to Office 365.

KAREN FOLEY: Yeah, and we'll show that now on the screen.

JAYNE HORNE:

Yep. So that's where it is. Click on that. It takes you through to the sign-in page. You pop in your academic email address, then you're Open University password, then you're in.

KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. OK. Lovely.

Now, I've got some questions here from people who we've talked about Office 365 earlier. So if someone's got a personal 365 account or an email address that uses the same email, like Hotmail or something, do they need to sign out of that then before they sign into this.

JAYNE HORNE:

Yes. Unfortunately, when you're signing in, if you're already signed in, it will just redirect you to your personal account. So what you need to do is sign out of your personal account, go back to the Office 365 link, and then sign in with your Open University one.

It's quite easy to do. I'm sure everybody's signed in and out of accounts quite a lot. But for Office 365 services, it's in the top right. You click on the little icon that contains your profile picture or your initials, and then just select Sign Out from there.

KAREN FOLEY:

Now, what happens then if people, like you just explained how to find your email address. So you can remember that. But what about the passwords? Is that something, I'm always forgetting passwords, and especially when I've got loads of different accounts.

JAYNE HORNE:

OK. So it uses the same password that you use to sign into the Open University. So if you forget that, you just go to the Open University and reset your password. You can do that online.

KAREN FOLEY: So it's the same password for everything, and the same OUCU for everything.

JAYNE HORNE: Mhm.

KAREN FOLEY: So you should write that down and,

[LAUGHING]

,keep it in a safe place to get into everything.

JAYNE HORNE:

Yep. Although, I have noticed some people, web browsers these days do like to store and save your passwords. Now, if yours does that, absolutely fine, but then you might be automatically signed into Student Home and thinking, oh goodness, well, how do I reset my password? If you already signed in, you can do it via that profile link again. On the right hand side, there's a Change Your Password section. Just remember that when you next go to sign in, you're going to have to type your password out rather than getting your web browser to remember it, because it will be remembering the old one.

KAREN FOLEY: OK. And then I can update it. All right. Brilliant.

So you get this academic email address. Do you then need to use it like to correspond with your tutor and things? Or what can you do with it?

JAYNE HORNE:

Entirely up to you. You can use it for correspondence. If you do want to do so, update your details while the Profile tab again. But you don't have to. If you want to continue using a personal email address, perhaps because you find it easier or you've got more access to it, it's like signed into all your phones, you're more than welcome to do so.

KAREN FOLEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. No, that's great. OK. Lovely.

And what are the benefits then of having that email address? Like what's the point of it?

JAYNE HORNE:

OK. So it proves your student status. We, as the Open University, give you the email address and say, yes, they're a student. So it's really handy if any companies or third parties provide discounts and offers to students. Quite often, they'll accept an academic email address as proof of your student status, and so you become eligible for the discounts and things like that.

KAREN FOLEY:

Because you can get a Totum card as well as an OU student, which gives you discounts on loads and loads of stuff, which is brilliant. But also, I think Amazon Prime do discounts as well, don't they?

JAYNE HORNE:

Yes, Prime, with an academic email address, they have different, what they offer is kind of up to them, but we do know that there's ones out there. If you do have any problems using your academic email address to register for these services, do you remember that you've got to go to that company or that service themselves. As the Open University, we say you're a student, but if they don't accept it, then-

KAREN FOLEY: It's them.

JAYNE HORNE: Yeah.

KAREN FOLEY:

So you can find out more about that, if you visit the Open University Students Association page, you can find out about the NUS or Totum card from that. And HS put a link in the chat as well for you. And also, from that, you can see some of the discounts on offer. So OK.

So basically, you set your email up, you can then use that to validate things, but you don't need to use it for correspondence. It's just a useful thing to have in case. That's cool. Right.

So what if students then already have an Office 365 account? Say they've downloaded it from something else and they've already been using their Open University email, what happens then? Is there a conflict?

JAYNE HORNE:

Oh, right. OK. So this is for students that may have been studying with us for a couple of years. You may have a Google Apps academic email address. Now, these accounts are being decommissioned in March, the end of this month. So if you've registered for Office usage by using that account, then you will lose access to that.

KAREN FOLEY: And what do you do then?

JAYNE HORNE:

You switch to the new account. If you're still studying, you'll have access to the new service. If you're not studying, unfortunately, you're not a student anymore, so you're not eligible for the new service. But you can download all of your documents, items, things like that from the Office 365 OneDrive. That's really important to do.

Also, with the Google Apps, if you've been using that during your studies, there's a service called Google Takeout. You can find the link via the Help Centre, or you can just search for it. Comes up really quickly. So if you've been using those services as well, you can use that to take all your information.

KAREN FOLEY:

So it' really important, if you want to keep TMAs that you've saved, for example, using those, then you need to do that by the end of March, is it?

JAYNE HORNE: Yes. I would say do it before the end of March so that you're not doing it last minute.

It's really essentially making local copies of any documents that you may have saved to OneDrive storage. The actual applications and things themselves, because that's software, you can replace it with other software. But your documents, because you know, they're the kind of piece of paper and the writing rather than the pen, you need to get those saved. You can always go and buy a new pen.

KAREN FOLEY: Yeah.

JAYNE HORNE: What you've actually written, if that gets thrown away, that's gone.

KAREN FOLEY:

I know, and I know from so many students they like seeing, you know, assignments that they've done in the past. It's always good to look back and see how much better you've got.

[LAUGHING]

OK. So that's the really, really important thing. What about then the Google Drive emails? If they are on there, will people lose all their emails, and does that matter?

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