We are going to explain to you what it is and what you can do with Microsoft Loop, the company’s new online productivity tool. It’s a direct competitor to Notion, an app with as many uses as you can imagine, and it’s already available for public preview.
We are going to start by explaining a little bit about exactly what this application is, which we could classify as a Swiss army knife for productivity. We’ll also talk about some of the things you can do with it, and then we’ll go on to tell you how you can try it out.
What is Microsoft Loop
Loop is Microsoft’s answer to Notion, and it was introduced in November 2021. We can refer to it as a flexible tool that you can adapt to multiple usesfrom the creation of an online agenda to creating task lists or many other things.
This service bases its operation on three basic elements: components, pages, and workspaces. A component is a self-contained, manipulable piece of information such as a text field, table, checklist, or document. Pages are made up of one or more of these components, and several pages will make up the work environments.
So you can create your own workspaces, and in each one have your pages, and then design each page as you need through the different components that you have at your disposal. The flexibility is total, and you can allocate each page or work environment to whatever you want, and create links between them.
Best of all, it’s it is also a collaborative tool, because it will allow you to share each work environment. Thus, you can create a work environment for a group of people and another environment for another, and you will be able to manage several projects that can be totally different, all in the same tool.
To be precise, in each work environment up to 50 people can be collaborating, and each one of them can be making changes and editions that will be saved in real time. In addition, you can do this directly from your browser or with the mobile application of the tool.
Finally, you should know that at the moment the current version of Microsoft Loop is trial, and that although we have access to it, it is still a preview version in development. This means that in the coming months there may be changes and additions, with new functions or others that disappear.
What you can do with Microsoft Loop
In Loop you can do everything you can. Imagine having a text editing tool that you can use for any taskfrom organizing your notes to creating to-do lists, managing your collections of whatever, EVERYTHING.
To do this, on each page you create you have different components available. You can write texts giving them the format you want, with headings, bold and italics. You can also add tables and different types of listswhich can be numbered, check or bulleted.
You can also add dividers, mention people or add tags so that when you click on them you will see all the pages that contain it, write emojis or add dates within your pages. Obviously, you will also be able to add multimedia files such as images.
all these are elements that you will be able to add to each of the pages, and each page you can give a different purpose as you want. Then, you will be able to organize your different pages in work environments, giving each one a different concept or purpose. This means that the options are as many as you can imagine.
And if so much flexibility has you overwhelmed and not knowing where to start, on the pages too you can add predefined templates, which currently can be from task lists, polling stations or process monitoring. But expect the number of templates to grow, and even third-party templates that you can apply.
All this, remember, you can use it to create personal projects or shared projects, and it can be up to 50 users in each work environment. All you need is to have a Microsoft account.
How you can test Microsoft Loop
If you want to access the preview version of Microsoft Loop, you can do so by going to the loop.microsoft.com website. Once in it, the first time you access from a browser you will need to sign in with your Microsoft accountand this will take you directly to the presentation workspace.
Even the presentation work environment itself with the tool information is editable, and you will be able to start practicing in it and get ideas from what Microsoft proposes. But then, you can click on the Loop logo to see your workspaces and create one, and then start creating pages on it.
Microsoft is also preparing applications for your mobile. The Android app is not yet available on Google Play, and to access the iOS one you will have to subscribe through Test Flight, which is the application platform in beta phase. The address to enter is aka.ms/LoopiOS.
