Office 365 Quick Start Guide

Summary

This article will provide information needed to get started using Office 365 for faculty and staff.

Body

Introduction 

Office 365 is a productivity environment that resides in the cloud.  Office 365 includes email, calendaring, tasks, and contacts (Outlook); file storage (OneDrive); and a number of other productivity tools such as OneNote and Delve. Office 365 allows you to access your email, files, and other productivity applications from anywhere you have an internet connection as well as from various mobile devices.

Special Concepts

  • Client Application- A software application that resides and is accessed on your computer.
  • Web Application-  A software application that resides and is accessed on the internet.

Steps to Access to Office 365 Web Application

  1. Go to http://portal.office.com 
  2. Sign in with your Indiana State University username and password. 
  3. Complete multifactor authentication if prompted.

NOTE: The landing page for Office 365 has been changed from OneDrive to Copilot. The Apps menu in the left-hand pane will bring you to the full application list.

Steps to Access Email

Outlook from Your Desktop Client Application

You can continue to use Outlook as normal from the client application that runs on your computer to access your email, calendars, contacts and task.   The only change should be that those items will now be stored off-campus rather than in our on-campus Exchange environment.

Outlook from Office 365 Web Application

All Outlook functions (email, calendar, tasks, people (contacts)) in Office 365 are always available through the Office 365 web application from any web browser anywhere with internet access.

  1. Go to http://portal.office.com 
  2. Sign in with your Indiana State University username and password. 
  3. Click Apps in the left-hand pane.
  4. Click the Outlook application to access your email, calendar, people (contacts) and task.

Please Note!  All of the functions in Outlook should work substantially the same in the Office 365 as they do from your desktop application.  However, web browsers may have different functionality.  For a consistent experience, Edge or Chrome browsers are recommended. Please consider the following as you use email in the Office 365 environment. 

Please consider the following as you use email in the Office 365 environment.

  • Your primary Inbox (with all sent and received mail, your trash folder, junk mail, and mail stored in folders) is accessible through Office 365 on the Web and through the Outlook client application that will continue to run on your computer. 
  • Your online (In Place) archive will be accessible through Office 365. 
  • Archives stored on your hard drive will continue to be accessible only through your Outlook desktop client application.
  • Webmail will route to Office 365 (office.portal.com) but for the time being you may continue to access webmail.indstate.edu.

Access to Apps 

The productivity applications may be accessed in the Office 365 portal on the launch page or by clicking the app launcher (waffle menu) in the top left corner of individual applications such as Outlook, when available. You will see a list of the applications available in the Office 365 portal.

The Office365 landing page has been replaced with Copilot

Install Microsoft Office

Students

Students can download and install Microsoft Office from within the Microsoft Office 365 portal. The Microsoft Office install includes products such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and more.

  1. Go to https://portal.office.com and sign in with your university account.
  2. On the left hand side, click Apps.
  3. At the top right of the page, click "Install Apps" and then choose Microsoft 365 apps from the drop-down.Uploaded Image (Thumbnail)
  4. Once downloaded, run the installer and follow the installation steps.

Faculty and Staff

You can find Microsoft Office already installed on your University-issued computer.

Additional Information

If you have questions about Office 365, feel free to contact the help desk for assistance.

Details

Details

Article ID: 49405
Created
Thu 3/1/18 4:53 PM
Modified
Mon 11/3/25 3:44 PM

Related Articles

Related Articles (3)

This article will assist anyone required to set up Office 365 Multi-Factor Authentication to access Office 365 resources. This article is for faculty, staff and student employees required to use Office 365 Multi-Factor Authentication.
This article will provide the standards for Microsoft 365 Group Management at Indiana State University. The target audience is group owners and students, faculty, and staff that use MS Groups.
Instruction on how to create and publish a basic Booking page for customers to schedule appointments.

Related Services / Offerings

Related Services / Offerings (2)

Use this service to report issues with email and calendaring.
Use this Service to report an issue with Office 365 applications other than email or calendaring. For example, OneDrive, OneNote, Delve, and others.