What is the quirkiest way you’ve seen people use Microsoft tools?

We asked Microsoft MVPs what they thought were some strange, funny, and quirky ways people use Microsoft tools. We put all their answers together into a short video montage. You can also check out their extended answers in this blog post to gain more of their awesome insights.

Dump huge amounts of data into one document library – Derek Cash-Peterson

So I’ve been working with SharePoint for 20 some odd years. I’ve seen a lot of really crazy stuff. I think the biggest thing that sort of makes me sort of itch is seeing clients that dump huge amounts of data, like straight from a file share into one document library and think that it’s going to work properly. You know what works properly on a file share is not what’s going to work properly in a document management system.

Using OneNote as content management – Emily Mancini

Sometimes when someone is introduced to a Microsoft tool, they decide they really like it. But just like we have a toolbox to do a bunch of different things, we don’t use a hammer for everything. I’ve seen people use OneNote as content management. They’re having shared meeting notes, they really love it. Then they throw in a table, drop in documents and in the column start adding information about it. That’s a SharePoint library with metadata. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to move out of that OneNote notebook and then use all the benefits of SharePoint that you’re really losing in a OneNote notebook.

Putting Excel lists inside a document library – Simon Hudson

I started out really doing the SharePoint stuff, so I’ve seen people create lists inside Excel and then put those Excel lists inside a document library when they could have just put all the metadata that they were trying to store in Excel directly inside the library on Microsoft List. So yeah, there’s that kind of madness, the one which really frustrates me is people that just use their inbox as a kind of data store. It’s just bonkers.

Also trying to get people to do that transition from being paper based to being fully online. You’ll see people doing weird things over sticky notes or have pieces of paper that would have been just much easier to do inside SharePoint.

I’ll tell you another story. My first company where I started, we were a couple of years in and one of my project managers went off sick, he had insisted he was gonna keep all of his project notes in his book. So I had to drive to his house, recover his project book, and then get the project back on track. And I banned paper notes as of that very day. The following day, all paper was banned from the office. You could put it on the desk, but at the end of the day, every piece of paper had to be in the shredder or the bin.

How many Microsoft employees are needed to fix audio out – Adis Jugo

For everyone who has seen our keynote yesterday, it was a great keynote. It was a lot of fun. How many Microsoft employees are needed to fix audio out on a Windows device? It was six of them, and it took them 5 minutes. We love Microsoft, but I just had to tell this story.

Creating a fantasy football league in SharePoint – Elio Struyf

That’s a difficult question. Most of the time in a real life scenario, I don’t see any quirky things, but I see people experimenting with things and doing test environments, which are always fun to see how they use it, like creating a catalogue of stickers for example. There are people that are into sports and then they create their fantasy football league in SharePoint for instance, and creating web parts with it. It’s definitely a funny thing to see there.

11 people working with one Microsoft 365 account – Marijn Somers

Oh so I’ve been a consultant for 16 years. I’ve seen many customers use Microsoft Technology in very specific, weird ways. One of the things that amazed me last year was a little company, 11 people, and they were all working with the same e-mail account from the same Microsoft 365 account. So they were using OneDrive as their collaboration place. So all the same account, which of course had so many people because you couldn’t see who was editing which file because they were all using the same account, which was so weird.

I just see people using SharePoint and Teams in weird ways. People would just create one public team for the whole organization, 500 people. And then they would only use that team to do everything. So that would just explode, and super weird.

Sharing terabytes on OneDrive – Gokan Ozcifci

One of the funny things that I’ve seen, back in time when Game of Thrones was a thing, our whole IT department downloaded the Game of Thrones series and uploaded them into OneDrive and then just shared to everyone in the organisation. If you don’t set up the guidelines or the proper way of using the tools, many people can do a bunch of stupid things such as putting some Game of Thrones videos, which could be like easily terabytes because they were all in full HD into OneDrive and sharing them.

Using Microsoft Teams just as a conversation base – Karoliina Kettukari

I’ve seen quite a lot as a consultant. But I think one funny (and also a little bit sad at the same time) way to use Teams is to just use it as a conversation base. Teams is so much more than just chat and channels and meetings. And if you just say “Hi, what’s up?” in the channel or chat conversations, you miss all the file sharing and document management, task management, and note taking applications in the whole Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Would you like to know more?

It was great hearing some funny and quirky stories from Microsoft MVPs. You can also hear their thoughts on the biggest security concerns for IT admins and what they’ve learned so far about Microsoft Copilot. Thank you to all the Microsoft MVPs for their insights!

If you’re looking for ways to keep Microsoft 365 compliant and secure, see how Syskit Point can help with a 21-day free trial.