Complete Guide to Every Microsoft 365 App Worth Knowing in 2025

The M365 app ecosystem can get really confusing. Even Microsoft gets confused. They have an app in their app launcher

that was retired in 2023. So, stay tuned to find out which one that is. But, I digress. Let's fix the

confusion. Today, we're going to walk through every app worth knowing and a few that probably aren't. Explain what

they actually do, whether you should care, and how it fits into your day-to-day work. Let's start with the

core functionality apps. First up, everybody's favorite, >> [music]

>> Word. Microsoft Word is the most popular document editor in the world. You can [music] write and format text, you can

check your spelling and grammar, you can collaborate on documents in real time. You can actually see people's cursors

and see them typing. And it can do lots more. If you need to write something that's going to get

shared with other people, this is probably where it happens. PowerPoint is a general-purpose presentation builder.

Chances are all those extremely fun slide decks you have sat through during quarterly update meetings were built

with PowerPoint. I may have or may not have created one of those in my time. You can create slides, you can design

and add visuals, and then also collaborate with others. Again here, you can see people editing

in real time. You're probably already familiar with like slide transitions, and you can make some some bullets pop

in as you click next, but you can actually make some pretty cool animations if you know what you're

doing. If you need to present ideas and want some visuals to go with it, this is definitely where to go. Next is Excel.

Excel happens to be the only M365 app that has a competitive [music] tournament structure built around it.

It's also where Dave from accounting meticulously tracks every invoice your company has sent since 1963. Outside of

that, Excel is built to allow you to analyze your data, your spreadsheets, build formulas, and create charts and

reports and things [music] like that. So, if you're working with numbers or large sets of data, this is the tool you

want to choose. OneNote is next. It's Microsoft's digital notebook. So, instead of dealing

with your notes spread across all three different notebooks and a random sticky note on your monitor, OneNote lets you

have all of the notes in one central place. You can take notes, organize them into sections and pages, and share them

with others. If you've been with us for a little while, you know that we actually recommend using Loop over

OneNote to our customers, but we know that's a little bit of a sensitive subject, so let's just say it's a place

for you to store your notes and move on. Completely unrelated, let's talk about Loop.

Loop is Microsoft's take on a collaboration-focused workspace. Think of it kind of like a

shared notebook that you and your team can all update [music] in real time, and it's built on a special thing called

components. [music] These components allow you to take the cool collaborative functionality of Loop and bring it into

other collaboration spaces like Teams and Outlook. So, let's say you're starting a new project and you want to

brainstorm with your team, without Loop, you'd probably have to have

someone schedule a call and have one person take notes and then email it later. But, if you use a Loop page, you

can create a page in Loop and then share your meeting agenda in the Teams channel with a component, and everybody can just

type in [music] it together, and it stays up-to-date everywhere that it's shared. It sometimes gets a bad rap

because it feels a little bit like an ugly stepchild of M365 that never really caught steam, but there's a lot of

powerful features in Loop. We think more people should be taking advantage of. I just so happen to have made a video

about what Loop is like in 2026, so we'll leave a link down below. Check it out.

All right, Edge is uh Microsoft's native web browser. There's not much more to say about it

than that. I'm just kidding. No, you can use it to browse things on the web. Nothing too special.

>> [music] >> It's way better than Internet Explorer ever was, and it uses a lot of the same

infrastructure that you see on more modern web browsers. Let's move on to Outlook. This is more

than likely one of your major communication hubs at work. We have a lot of thoughts about why people should

be moving away from email as much as possible, but we can't deny that there's a lot of work that still gets done in

this app. You can send emails, you can manage your emails, you can schedule meetings, keep track of your day, and

see information about the people that you're working with. Sometimes it's hard to know what's an app versus a just a

feature within an app. You might see calendar or people listed as apps in some of the places in M365, but if you

ever click on them in an apps list, they actually just redirect you to that feature in Outlook. Calendar is an app

in Outlook where you can manage your meetings and focus blocks. People is another one. It's a digital contacts

list. You can add contacts internal or external to your list, and then you'll have all their contact information in

one place. Next up is Teams. It's a big one. It's the home of finding creative methods to

keep your mouth moving while you watch the reruns of The Office for the 17th time over and over and over. Just

kidding. You would never do that. Right? This is Microsoft's real-time

communication and collaboration app, where instead of making long email threads, you can just have conversation

that happens more immediately, real-time, within the app. You can chat with individuals or groups. You can

create channels or teams for your projects. Maybe you can jump on calls or meetings,

which is what we see a lot of the time. Or you can collaborate on files, just all in one place. Based on everything

we've seen over the last few years, it seems like Microsoft is pushing Teams to be a central hub for people's work. Your

calendar also lives here. They have options for showing your organization's intranet right in Teams, etc. Things

like that. In my opinion, Microsoft has given up a little bit on this dream because it seems like they're pushing us

all over into the Copilot app world, but we'll talk about that in a minute. If you were maybe forced to use Teams in

2020 for all of your meetings and kind of got a bad taste in your mouth and haven't tried it again since, you should

probably give it another shot. It's gotten a lot better in the past couple years, and it just may push us to switch

from Slack over into Teams, but that's a topic for another video. Whiteboard is another collaboration

tool. Similar to Loop, it kind of gives you a real-time view of who's doing what on the screen, but more in a flat, think

whiteboard space, less uh up and down document sort of feel. We find that the feature set is a little bit limiting, so

we substitute with an alternative called FigJam. But, if you're looking for a simple way to replicate a whiteboard

session that you had in a conference room in a virtual environment, this is what it's for.

>> [music] >> Bookings is next. It's Microsoft's response to Calendly and other

scheduling tools. Bookings attempts to streamline the meeting scheduling process, where you create links that you

can send out to people might want to schedule time with you, and it lets them just pick a time that works for them.

This integrates right with your Outlook calendar, so someone doesn't double-book over your time. It's not quite as

feature-rich as something like Calendly if you are a power user there, but if you're just looking for basic

functionality and you want to test a new way to schedule meetings, might be a good option for you.

Forms is Microsoft's tool for collecting information from other people. It lets you make surveys and polls and

quizzes and then publish them by sending a link out to other people that they can open and then fill out. It'll also

visualize the results for you so you can present it in a meeting or you can export the results to Excel and use it

however you please. Viva is next and it's an interesting one because it's presented as

an app and has a landing page like other apps, but it's actually a bit more of like a collection of apps. Overall, Viva

is Microsoft's employee engagement program where they offer services like an education platform with Viva Learning

or an engagement platform where you can make different [music] communities and discuss shared topics like Viva Engage.

Viva Insights will give you insights on your workplace for things like how many hours you spend in meetings, how long

it's been since you've had a one-on-one with your direct reports, [music] and more. Viva's Connections app is also

the service I mentioned earlier that lets you put your intranet inside the Teams app. Just reading my tea leaves,

it feels a little bit like Viva is slowly going away, but at the moment you should think about it as Microsoft's

employee experience platform that [music] might be really helpful if HR wants to give you and your coworkers a

place that you can go and socialize with it being >> [music]

>> kind of adjacent to the tools that you work in already. It's hard to really call Viva an app, but it is presented

that way in a few places so we felt like we need to mention it. Planner, let's talk about Planner. It's

everyone's favorite topic around here. Planner is a lightweight project management software that comes in the

Microsoft suite. If you've ever used it, you'll know why we put some emphasis on that lightweight part of that

introduction. It gives you the basic functionality of creating tasks, assigning them to people, setting due

dates, >> [music] >> tracking progress, things like that.

That's within basic plans. You can also buy a license to a premium planner where you get more features like Gantt charts

and dependencies and subtasks and things like that that might feel a little more full-featured. And Microsoft is blurring

those lines a little bit and bringing them all together just in Planner instead of having them be distinct

experiences. It does still require the extra license, which is annoying, but uh you can count on seeing those things

being brought together here very [music] soon. That said, it's all far from finished. So, if you are in a hurry and

you're building big plans and lots of intricate details around that, you might want to hold off

on Planner and lean into something that's more purpose-built for project management for the time being, but

[music] we are ever hopeful that it is continuing to improve and will one day feel like the thing that we can stamp

our our stamp of approval on. If you're hearing us talk about project management tools and screaming at your

monitor saying, "What about Microsoft Project?" this is for you. Microsoft Project was Microsoft's original attempt

at an enterprise project management [music] software, and it served project managers around the world for over 40

years. It's still technically available. The web-based version is being discontinued in September of 2026,

depending on when you're watching this, and it's not currently available for purchase. You're also able to

technically download your own version of the software and host your own server for it, but

save yourself the trouble. It's probably not worth it. So, check out Planner or any of the other project management

options if you need something. Speaking of niche task management solutions, let's talk about everyone's

favorite To Do. To Do is a place where you can create your own task list and then [music] bring it together with the

tasks that you've already been assigned to in Planner. It's technically a part of Planner nowadays, but you might see

the To Do name hang around for a little bit longer. If you're a solo operator or you just need a place to wrangle your

own tasks, To Do is worth a look. Just know that anything you put here stays with you. Your team can't see it. So,

you can't create tasks here and expect your team to do something with them. [music] You just use it for personal

stuff and keep the real project work over in Planner. OneDrive is everyone's favorite file

storage platform. It acts as cloud storage for your files, so you don't really need to keep all your work files

saved to your computer. It [music] also gives you the ability to share access to those folders and files

with other people, so you can work collaboratively. I put some sarcasm around the word

collaboratively because we find OneDrive to actually inhibit collaboration. That's because it's tied to you. It's

tied to an individual. If your co-worker were to leave and they had a bunch of important information there, it almost

just goes poof and you lose access to all that information. We find a lot of our clients have

incredibly important sources of information there and and data stored in their OneDrives that can lead to some

serious headaches that are avoidable. The way you can avoid those headaches is by using an inherently shared storage

system like SharePoint. That's a pretty good transition. Pretty smooth if I do say so myself. SharePoint is Microsoft's

tool for organizing, storing, and sharing files across a team or an organization. You can create a site for

different teams or projects and store documents and collaborate on them with others. Fun fact, Microsoft Teams is

using this very technology under the hood. If you're working with shared files or team content, there's a good

chance it lives here behind the scenes. We find that SharePoint can be a little confusing or intimidating for folks that

are new to it, so let's break it down. Most organizations have a main company site. This is usually where

>> [music] >> company-wide information lives, like announcements or important resources. We

call it an intranet a lot of the time. Then, separate from that, you have an individual team or project site. And

those sites [music] exist within their own workspace. It's like its own files and pages and content

for that specific group of people. So, instead of everything living in one giant place, SharePoint splits things up

into smaller, organized spaces depending on [music] who's working on what. SharePoint has the same file

infrastructure that's managing all your files like you might be used to in OneDrive, but it also has [music]

a front end to that. It has an interface that allows you to interact with that information on a website like you would

any other external website. If you're listening to us talk about the concept of personal storage and organizational

knowledge, we cover this in a lot more detail in our 365 Foundations course. It's designed to help you understand how

the tools all fit together so you [music] can use them more effectively in your day-to-day work.

Check out the link below. Let's continue. Next up is a fun one. It's Lists. This

is Microsoft's tool for tracking structured information. Think Excel, but more focused on organizing and managing

data. [music] When we introduced Excel, we said Excel was great for analyzing data, but we

didn't say anything about storing data. There are a lot of use cases where people use Excel to store their data and

refer back to it later >> [music] >> who would be much better served in

creating the same information in lists and then exporting it to Excel when you want to manipulate or analyze the data.

You can create a list of items, add columns of different types of information, and track things in a more

flexible way than a standard table. If you need to keep track of information that doesn't really fit neatly into a

document or a task list, check out lists next time before defaulting to Excel. Fun fact, lists comes from SharePoint

lists. That's the original place that you could create lists and they have now surfaced it into its own app.

Microsoft Access, we're talking about Access. It's a database tool where you can build and manage large sets of data.

It's a professional-grade tool meant for information systems professionals to create custom tools. If you ever heard

about Access, just skip to the next app. If you're If you want If you're a completionist and you want to to know

that we know about Access and you're still holding on to your Access database, [music] it's a tool where

professionals can can store information in a database and, you know, create custom tools from it, but

it's it's on its way out, guys, okay? Let's talk about the next one. All right, let's dig into what Microsoft

calls the Power Platform. If you're wondering why I now magically am wearing a different shirt, M365 has so many apps

that it took us 2 days to cover them all. The Power Platform is not an app, but a

suite of apps that gives users the ability to make their own solutions to their problems in their everyday work.

It's designed to enable power users or citizen developers to create [music] custom solutions to their problems. They

also seamlessly work with all the apps in the Microsoft 365 [music] ecosystem. This functionality allows the

Power Platform tools to do things like when this email is sent from Outlook, take that information and put [music] it

in this Excel sheet. It takes all the different apps in the M365 world and helps them work [music] together. These

tools are a bit more advanced than most of the stuff we've covered so far. If any of it seems interesting to you and

you want to see us go deeper into anything >> [music]

>> in the Power Platform, let us know down in the comments. First up is Power Apps. When we said

Microsoft makes apps that builds other apps, this is the one. It's Microsoft's tool for building your own custom apps

without needing to be a developer. You can build forms for collecting data, you can build internal

tools where you want to manage information, or you can build multi-screen apps with navigation and

conditional logic and >> [music] >> connected data sources

all in one app. If your team has repetitive processes that lives in a spreadsheet, which is a no-no,

uh an email chain, or just someone's memory, Power Apps is how you can turn that into something people can actually

interact with. Let's look at an example. Say your company has an expense reporting process that lives in

someone's inbox. People email them receipts and maybe someone logs them and finance

rebuilds the same spreadsheet every month. Power Apps is where you fix the front end of that problem. You can build

a simple app, say a form where employees submit their expenses, upload a receipt, and hit submit. That's it from their

side. They They're They're all done. The app is all of the the forms, the visuals, everything that people interact

with. Now, when you need something to happen after that submission, like let's say route it to a manager for approval,

or maybe you just need to log it somewhere, or let somebody know in a Teams channel, that's where you can

bring in Power Automate. Power Automate lets you make things called flows that automate certain

actions when a specific trigger occurs. A trigger is the thing that kind of sets everything into motion. So, when an

expense report is submitted, that's the trigger. And then an action is something that happens after the trigger happens.

So, upload that receipt to SharePoint. Then you can start chaining additional actions together with a trigger, and

that creates a flow. You can have flows that aren't tied to a Power App, but for the sake of simplicity, let's bring it

back to our scenario of Power Apps. The The moment someone submits in that app, that's the trigger. Power Automate takes

it from there and notifies a manager in Teams. It captures the submission. It logs it to a SharePoint list, let's say.

The employee just filled out a simple form, and everything else happened automatically.

Next app is Power BI. This is Microsoft's power tool for turning data into [music] charts and insights and

things like that. I know we just told you Excel is great for analyzing and visualizing data, and

it is, and that's where some people will live, but a lot of people start to run into limitations where Power BI might be

a good uh solution. So, if you're trying to track data across multiple sources or constantly build reports, and

you probably start to feel like it's not the right tool for the job anymore. Power BI lets you connect that data,

build a dashboard once, and then have it update automatically. So, back to our expense example, the user submitted the

expense through the Power App. Power Automate logs it to SharePoint through the flow. Now Power BI can connect to

that data, and finance gets a dashboard that shows spending by department, employee, category, etc. [music] Just

automatically updated every time a new expense comes in. No one is rebuilding that report at the

end of the month. They They just set from this date to this date show me the information and it will show you exactly

[music] what you need. So Power BI is the tool that lets you build that dashboard once and then have [music] it

update automatically using as many data sources as you need really. It's also the solution for hey, can you send me

that report? You say, here's your link. Go get whatever data you want. It's a

It's a common thing that we see with some of our clients. Copilot Studio is sort of on the fringe

of what we would consider an app but at this point the definition of an app is out the window. So we're going to cover

it under the Power Platform. Copilot Studio is Microsoft's tool for building custom AI agents.

>> [music] >> You might recognize the term Power Virtual Agents.

Now you can build agents that answer questions, interact with your data, or take actions across your workflows. And

now they're adding the Copilot smarts to it. It lets you create these agents with [music]

plain text prompts and you describe what you want and Copilot will run off and basically use its best guess to build

the agent that you want and you can tweak it from there. You can give an agent knowledge from SharePoint sites.

Hopefully not but you can add OneDrive files and other data sources. Then tools will let you take specific actions and

even the ability to work with other agents. So bringing all those together allows this thing to understand a

request, decide when it needs to happen, and then coordinate complex workflows across multiple systems. So let's say in

our expense example, you could remove the Power App and then just make it a Copilot agent that lives in a Teams

channel and then that can trigger the same Power Automate flows we were using before. Then AI will just be able to

take the information from the receipt and drop it right into the SharePoint list with that expense log. We actually

just made a video on the topic of AI and the Power Platform, and it goes through a similar example. So, if you want to

see more, go check it out at the link in the description. Next up is Power Pages. Power Pages is a

low-code app in the Power Platform that lets you make externally accessible web pages. So, [music] everything that we've

talked about so far is internal. It's meant for you and your coworkers to use. If you need someone externally to have

access to things that are in your tenant and able to interact with it in the context

of an app or a website, that's what Power Pages is for. So, if you've ever used something like Squarespace or Wix

to build a website, it's similar, but a little bit more limited when it comes to design and flexibility. Where Power

Pages really stands out is how it integrates with the Power Platform. If your goal is just to build a website,

this is not the tool. There's better tools out there. But, if you need a site that connects directly to your M365

[music] systems and data, it starts to make a lot more sense. And now with tools like

GitHub Copilot or Claude Code, you can actually build websites. You can build the code for those websites

>> [music] >> pretty quickly and sync it up into that Power Page. So, you end up building an

app that's externally accessible pretty quickly. There is a little bit of a licensing difference that is is worth

noting, but I'll leave that for another video. That's it for the Power Platform. It's whole reason it exists is to help

you build and and fill gaps where either a tool off the shelf doesn't work or one of Microsoft's existing tools just

doesn't make the cut. Now, if you've been paying attention, you will have noticed we've barely talked about AI so

far, and that's because AI isn't really a category of apps in Microsoft 365. It's more of a layer that Microsoft is

trying to build across the apps. But, there is a common way that people interact with it, and that is

[clears throat] through the Copilot app. You should think of the Copilot app as your starting point for getting things

done with AI and M365. By now, you have probably noticed that Microsoft gives you lots of different tools and places

that you can store and manage your information. There's emails in Outlook and files in SharePoint and chats in

Teams and notes in Loop and tasks in Planner and the list goes on and on. The Copilot app sits across all of that and

lets you interact with it just [music] in plain language. So, instead of opening five different apps to get

context on a project, you can just >> [music] >> ask Copilot. You can skip the the jumps

between Outlook and SharePoint to pull [music] something together and ask Copilot. And beyond finding information,

it can take action for you. It can draft emails, summarize meetings, create content. It can update tasks without you

even needing to know which app to open first. All right, I think we have covered the the main players in the

Microsoft 365 world. What's left is a lot of miscellaneous apps. It's the digital equivalent of the junk drawer

that everyone has in the kitchen. Some are super helpful, some not so much, and now we can even talk about the one that

doesn't exist anymore. Kaizala is a tool that helped communication in a large workforce where there were lots of

external vendors and [music] contractors and you needed to communicate seamlessly.

Microsoft officially retired it in 2023 and replaced it with Teams, but it's still in the all apps section and we're

not especially sure why that link just takes you to a broken website, but it's in the all apps section, so we're going

to cover it. Next up is Clipchamp. Clipchamp is a simple video editor that exists in your browser or as a

standalone app on Windows machines. You can make basic edits to videos, you can record new clips, you can add text and

voice-overs and more. You're not going to make a cinematic masterpiece in Clipchamp. Actually, maybe you will. Let

let me know if you make cinematic masterpieces in Clipchamp. Um but, it's very helpful for a lot of the workplace

scenarios that we see. Next up is Sway, Microsoft Sway. Let's just say there's some solid reasons why

Sway finds its spot in this video in the app junk drawer. Sway is Microsoft's attempt at creating a middle ground

between a PowerPoint presentation and a website. So, instead of building traditional slides, you create a

scrolling interactive experience that's designed to look good on any device, really. If you've ever wanted something

that's a little more engaging than a PowerPoint deck, but don't want to build a full website, Sway might be worth

checking [music] out. This is the first time you've heard of Sway, don't worry, you're not alone. We have found use in

it when we need to deliver reports to some of our clients on a monthly basis. We just send them a link to a Sway.

[music] Next up is Visio. If PowerPoint is for presentations, Visio is for diagrams.

>> [music] >> Visio is Microsoft's tool for creating process flows and network diagrams,

floor plans, etc. Any sort of visual documentation that you need. [music] It comes with a big library of shapes and

templates that are designed for specific industry use cases. And so, it makes it a lot easier than trying to build the

same thing manually in PowerPoint. If this looks like something you make often, or should be making often, and

you haven't heard of Visio, you should probably go check it out. Last but not least, our long-lost love,

Microsoft Publisher. Publisher is Microsoft's desktop publishing tool where you can create designs [music]

like brochures and flyers. It first came out in 1991, and a few years ago Microsoft realized the functionality of

that app was duplicated in Word and PowerPoint, so they're retiring it at the end of this year. And judging by the

state of its website, Microsoft seems pretty [music] ready to move on. And that is Microsoft 365. If you've made it

all the way through the video, congrats. You now know more about the M365 app ecosystem [music] than most people who

use it every day. Also, we have managed to get through most of this video without talking about licensing once. If

you want to see a similar video trying to map out Microsoft's licensing options and explain which plans include what,

let us know in the comments. Fair warning though, that video might be even more confusing than this one. If you

think we missed an app, yell at us in the comments. Let us know. Or if this was helpful, consider subscribing, and

we'll see you in the next one. >> [music]