OneDrive & Microsoft Office 365

All students registered at Clinton Community College have the ability to download Office 365 for free. This provides students with up to five copies of Microsoft Office on compatible devices of their choosing.  The campus move to MS Office 2013 has been exciting, providing new features and resources to support students as they work through the semester. 

One such feature, OneDrive, affords students the opportunity to save documents to a cloud space that allows access to these documents from anywhere with an Internet connection.  This is an improvement over the "network space or N: drive" allotted students in the past, as when documents are saved to the network space, they can only be retrieved while on campus.  

Of course, with anything new, there is a learning curve, and the potential for problems.  Many students have come to library staff requesting assistance because they've created documents, saved them, gone back to retrieve them, and the work is not there.  Where did it go?  It's hard to say without seeing the saving process, so I would like to share some information that should help to prevent issues like this in the future. 

Here's our suggestion:  Right after logging into a computer, go to the Douglas Library home page and click on the link at the bottom of the page to Access MS Office 365.  A browser window will open, and you will encounter an Office 365 login screen.  Type your CCC username and password in and click Sign in.  If asked, select school account.  Now, when going through the "save" process, users will see OneDrive as an option.  That's it! 

For more information or if you need assistance visit the Using Office in Online in OneDrive page. If you cannot log into OneDrive, email the IT Coordinator, who will investigate the issue and then respond once resolved.  

Lastly, please DO NOT SAVE to ‘Documents or Desktop' on the computers on campus.  Because campus computers for public use are "frozen" to prevent damage due to viruses and malicious software, anything saved to the computer (C: drive, Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc.) will be permanently erased once logged or powered off.     

For more information about Office 365, Microsoft Office 2013, or OneDrive, please visit the CCC IT website of Commonly Asked Questions, or the Office 365 Learning Center website. 

Converting file formats

I saved my term paper at home in a file format that doesn’t work on campus. What can I do?

If you have saved your term paper in a format that is not supported on this campus, you can convert your file by following these easy steps as suggested by the IT Department.

Saving your work on campus

I saved my work on a computer in the lab. When I came back after my class, I couldn’t find my saved document on the computer.

You cannot save a document to the campus computers because all changes are lost when you log off. You can save your work to your campus network folder or save to an external drive, such as a thumb or flash drive.

My Computer Froze

I worked on my research paper for hours, then my computer froze. I had to retype my entire paper. How do I prevent this from happening again?

Get in the habit of saving your work every twenty minutes or so. If your computer freezes, you'll only lose about twenty minutes of work. If you're working on campus, make sure to save your work to a flash drive or to your campus network folder, because you'll lose any work that's saved to the computer desktop once you log off.