I love telling people what I do. Changing the way users work, teaching the latest and greatest business technology, helping organizations become more productive—what’s not to love? But I seem to get one question pretty frequently. “It’s just Office. Doesn’t everyone know how to use it?” In response, here are a few points that I typically share:

1. Not everyone knows Office

I know it’s a little surprising, but new organizations are joining the Microsoft family every day. Although the majority of the business world is using Office, a large number of organizations and users are unfamiliar with Microsoft tools and solutions. Sure, your users might have Office at home—but how they use it at home and how they use it at work can vary drastically. It’s important that users know what tools can help them get their jobs done.

2. Users only use about 13 percent of available features

The average Microsoft Office user leverages only 13 percent of the available features. That 13 percent represents the most basic functionality that a user needs to perform his or her job.

When did 13 percent become acceptable? If I got 13 percent on anything in school, I don’t think my teachers would have been very pleased. That unused 87 percent represents some of the most time-saving, productivity-enhancing functionality that the modern workplace has ever seen. The more features your users adopt, the more valuable as employees they’ll become.

Consider this example of an Outlook feature that has existed since 2007 that is grossly underused.

3. New technology appears everyday

Microsoft’s business software is constantly advancing, but users are not progressing as quickly. We call this the software skill gap. Consider a tool like OneDrive for Business. This new technology (highly integrated into the Office/Business/User experience) allows employees to share, store, access, and collaborate on documents like never before. The typical Office user—who learned Office 10+ years ago—is not familiar with this tool. Without a push in the right direction, users will continue sending attachments, creating endless versions, and saving documents to local and USB drives.

Helping users learn new and time-saving ways of working is one of the most exciting parts of what we do at BrainStorm and will create a greater return on your company’s software investment.

Now you can see why, in my mind, there’s no such thing as “just Office.” Users across the world need that motivation towards greater software usage. At BrainStorm we specialize in helping organizations get the most out of their software investments by helping end users see more of what’s possible.

Learn more about BrainStorm’s training and adoption solutions.