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How to Use Delve for Office 365: Finding People and Information

3 minute read

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This is part one of a two-part series of posts on Office Delve, Office 365’s tool for finding, displaying, and sharing information like documents and files. If you’re not familiar with Delve, check out our post What is Office Delve?

The best way to discover general content through Delve is via the Home and Me pages. If you want to check out materials originating from a specific person, you can do that too. We’ll show you how to do both.

How to Use the Delve Home Page

The Home page is where you’ll find the files that Delve surfaces automatically for you with the Office Graph. In other words, if Delve thinks that a particular file is relevant to you, it will appear on the Home page.

The best way to use the Home page is to simply open it and explore. Launch Delve from the app launcher and check out the content cards that appear.

The details that appear on the content cards give you clues to why a file may appear and whether or not it needs your attention; you’ll see where it came from (i.e. John Smith’s OneDrive), what kind of file it is (i.e. PDF), how many views it has, and who else it’s shared with. You can also add it to a board and/or share it with others. Of course, you’ll only see documents that you have access to.

The Home tab gets better over time, as you and your colleagues collaborate more in Office 365, so if you don’t see useful files yet, that doesn’t mean you never will. In the meantime, check out the sections below to learn more about how to use Delve to manage your own files, and how to find information and files from other specific individuals.

Click here to learn more about how Office Delve chooses which files are relevant to you.

How to View Documents You’ve Recently Created or Modified on Delve

Me tab on Office DelveFrom your Home page, you can click on the Me tab to see your own documents and files.

Why do I need to look at a page to find my own files when I can just open OneDrive, you might ask? Well, the Me page shows files you’ve created or modified across Office 365, in one place. So it can be a good place to go to find recent work that you may need to access or sort onto boards. (More on boards in part 2 of this post tomorrow.)

How to Find Information and Files From Others on Delve

Click on Content Card in Office DelveOn your Home page, you’ll see content cards displaying documents and files from other people in your organization. Clicking on the top bar of the content card will take you to that user’s Profile page.

If your Home page isn’t robust yet, or you don’t see anything from a particular person you’re looking for, you can view their individual page.

The People tab on the left side of Delve will contain a list of people you’ve recently viewed or collaborated with. If you don’t see who you’re looking for, use the Search bar at the top of the page to find a person or file.

The person’s page will contain the documents (files) you have access to on the Activity tab, and public information about him or her on the Profile tab.

Check out the video below for a walkthrough of how to find information and files from others:

YouTube video

Thanks for reading part one in our “How to Use Delve” series. Stay tuned for part two tomorrow: Grouping and Sharing Documents.

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