# Summary The Hackerspace has a subscription to Microsoft's [Microsoft 365 (aka Office365)](https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365) service. It is currently provided free by Microsoft. It provides us with the email system that we use for Hackerspace governance and gives a document store for us to store and edit Microsoft Office files such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. We can also store non-Office documents (such as PDFs) but the system doesn't provide for these to be edited on-line. These documents provide us with our long-term organisational archive, independent of changes in membership of the Committee and the Executive. All Committee members have access to this document store. The document store is accessed via the Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint systems. This is a guide to logging in to access, add, remove or change items in the document store. Editor's notes: 1. This is a slight edit of a document originally written for a different organisation. I've not changed the images so some of the details on the screenshots are wrong for us. 1. The original target audience was lower in technical competence than HHS members, so just skip over the low-level stuff... *Ed* ## Notes on terminology *SharePoint* and *OneDrive* are two different names for ways to get to the document store. They have slightly different "user experiences", but both provide access to the same underlying set of documents. For simplicity, this document will focus on just one of those pathways: *OneDrive*. Similarly, *Microsoft 365* was previously known as *Office365*, so you may see reference to either term. For brevity and consistency, this document refers to a "Microsoft account" that you connect to with a user-ID and password and "OneDrive" as the document store to which you then have access. # Logging in 1. For any of this to work, you need to have access to your Hobart Hackerspace Microsoft account details. Your user name will be something of the form: `[email protected]`. If you don't know your username and password, send an email to <[email protected]> and request the details. You will receive an email reply containing a username and a link to click on to connect to the system. A password will be provided separately. When you first connect, you will be asked to set a password that you know and can remember. 2. You may have Microsoft 365 accounts for other purposes than the Hobart Hackerspace. These can be both a personal account and other organisational accounts such as work, school or other volunteer organisations. As noted above, they may be called "Microsoft 365" or "Office365". If you have any such accounts, the next few points are essential: - Multiple Microsoft accounts can cause confusion in use. You need to remain aware of which account you are using at any point in time. - If you (or others who use your computer) have multiple accounts, you can tell which account you are using by clicking on your user icon (the little round icon in the top right-and corner of your browser window that has in it your initials in it or your personal photo, if you've created one). - You can switch between such accounts simply by clicking on the user icon and selecting a different account. 3. To log in, open your favourite web browser and go to: [office.com](https://office.com/) 4. At this point, if you are not signed into any Microsoft account with that web browser, it will offer you a way of signing in. If, however, you are already signed into another account, it will open a page into that account (see 6 below). 5. There are many forms of the pages asking you to sign in, depending on previous usage on your computer. But they have key things in common: - There may be a button that says "Sign in", without any associated email address. If so, click it. - It will ask you for your email address or it may offer you one or a list of ones it knows about. Either way, it wants your Hobart Hackerspace email address, as mentioned in section 1 above. Ensure that the correct one is there, or type it in where it says "Email , phone, or Skype", then click "Next" or "Sign in". - It will require your password. If you've logged in recently using this computer and web browser, it may already know that and present you with a line of dots. Otherwise, type in (or paste in) your password. Press "Next". 6. If it immediately opens a page into another Office365/Microsoft365 account that you are subscribed to, don't fuss, just click on your personal user icon in the top RH corner and select "Log in with a different account". - It will then ask you to choose from a list of addresses by which it knows you or to "Use another account". - If your Hackerspace account is listed, click on it, otherwise select "Use another account" and proceed to enter your Hackerspace address and password as in 5 above. 7. If this is your first time logging in, you'll be asked to change your password (to something that you know and that you can both remember and keep secret). You'll also be asked to provide alternative contact details in case you forget your password. This will come under the heading of "Your organisation needs more details to be secure" or similar wording. 8. Once you've successfully logged in, you should be presented with a screen that looks something like this:\  9. You can select Microsoft 365 applications from the bar down the right-hand side or from the "channel nine" icon in the top right. The bar on the right won't always be there, but the "channel nine icon" seems always to be present (albeit in different colours). 10. The two most useful apps are: - Outlook (for Hackerspace-related email and events) and - OneDrive (for document storage and sharing).\ You may need to open the App selector ("channel nine") to see the OneDrive icon 11. If you don't have Word or Excel installed, the online versions of those are available, too, but with less functionality than the installed versions. See the note below if you wish to use another Office-like application or application suite # Access to documents The Hackerspace's document store is best viewed using the OneDrive application within Microsoft 365. They are also accessible from other Microsoft 365 applications, but OneDrive provides a file-and-folder view that is nearest to that which you're used to using with Windows (or MacOS). Once you're logged in to Microsoft 365, you can use the OneDrive application by clicking on the OneDrive icon as shown in item 5 above. That will normally take you to a screen that looks like this (the actual files listed will be different):  The first time that you log in the display above will be slightly different -- it may not have anything below the "Quick Access" heading. If this is the case, to get to the Committee files, here's what to do: - Under "Quick Access" in the left-hand margin, click on "More places\..." - Then click on "Go to SharePoint Home" - Under "Featured links" in the left-hand margin, click on "Committee Documents" - Open any one of the documents that are accessible from the "Committee" page Then, next time you go to OneDrive, you'll have "Committee" showing under "Quick Access". Within the "Committee" folder, there are sub-folders for various aspects of Hackerspace governance, including things like Meetings, Membership, and our Publications. Feel free to explore. ## Replication of OneDrive documents onto your local computer It's always possible to download OneDrive documents to your computer, edit them there and re-upload them. But this doesn't preserve the document history (who edited it when) nor provide for reversion to earlier versions. Both these capabilities are provided when you edit documents on-line. You can get those capabilities, however by installing the *Microsoft OneDrive* application. This provides a locally-stored copy of the documents, while also providing almost-instant replication and change tracking of files. It even shows when someone else is editing the same document and where they are editing it. *Microsoft OneDrive* runs on Windows machines and (slightly less-reliably) on MacOS. It's not available for Linux machines. A comparable ability is provided on pads and phones with a *Microsoft OneDrive* app. In all cases, download it from your app store. # Committee document format The normal formats for our documents for internal use are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. For distribution to members we convert them to PDF, so that there is no requirement for members to have copies of Word or Excel. Clicking on a Word or Excel document on a OneDrive or SharePoint web page will open it within your web browser in a web version of Microsoft Word or Excel. These versions are functional but clumsy in some ways and limited in others. If you have Microsoft Office installed on the computer from which you are viewing the OneDrive pages, you can choose to open the documents in the application on your machine instead of in the web browser. To do this, either:  - click on the group of three dots in a vertical line that shows up when you hover over the document's title on the page, - choose "Open" then "Open in app" from the little side menu that shows. - or click the document title to open it in the browser, then - Close to the top of the page that opens, there's a button labelled "Editing ∨" - if you click on that, it will offer you the option: "Open in Desktop App" In either case, once you've opened it on your local machine you will see, in the very top bar of the open document, an "AutoSave" slider-switch icon. If you leave that turned on, all changes to the document will automatically be saved back to the OneDrive store as you make them, so others can see them at the same time. This is a great feature in meetings where several may be viewing and sharing simultaneously. Turn it off if you want to create a different document by using the first one as a base. ## Use of alternate applications Some folks prefer to use non-Microsoft applications for text and spreadsheet documents. If you choose to do so, that is your choice, but our experience with folks doing that in the past leads to some caveats that you will have to live with: - Recognise that many people don't even understand that there ARE different word processor & spreadsheet applications. - So the use of the native formats of those applications can be extremely confusing. - Whatever format you use on your own machine, please place documents for sharing on the OneDrive in Microsoft Office format. Any of the alternative "Office" suites offer the option to save in a Microsoft-compatible format. - Saving in Microsoft Office format enables both: - automatic opening on a single click and - dynamic tracking of changes being made by another user. - The latter is particularly important when documents are being shared during meetings.