There are continual updates to Office 365 and OneDrive. One of them is a streamlined way to send documents without having 
to log into your cloud account as long as your documents are stored in OneDrive. Streamlined meaning you don’t send the document itself, instead you’re sending the recipients a link. We’re going to step you through how to do it.
Before this update appeared, if you wanted to share a document with someone, you had to log into the OneDrive website, then navigate to the file(s) you wanted to share and then click the checkbox next to the file name and click ‘Share’, then either fill out the form that would pop up, or get a link from the pop-up form and insert it in your own email client. That’s a lot of steps and an interruption of your work flow.
I wish I could say it was as easy as being in the desktop Outlook client and clicking the ‘insert attachment’ to get a link and send the link out. (Now this will be a feature very soon in the web Office 365 Outlook client, but not desktop). It’s a bit more work than that, but you won’t have to log into the OneDrive web app. I’ve tested this when selecting documents from my OneDrive for Business and my regular OneDrive. Both work the same way.
Send a Sharing Link From Microsoft Office
So I have a PowerPoint document that I’m ready to send to someone. From PowerPoint, I click on ‘File’, this takes me to the backstage area of PowerPoint. Now click on ‘Share’. Over to the right, you’ll get the ‘Invite People’ pop-up. From here, it functions pretty much like if you’re in the cloud. Type a person’s email address or get a link. There’s a box for you to type in a message and also a check-box if you want the person to be able to edit the document.
Then you can either send the document from the backstage area or get the link and go to your email client and send from there – either works. So you’ve saved yourself a bit of time not having to go to the cloud to send your doc or get your link.
In order for this to work, you will have had to have your OneDrive app or apps (there’s a separate app for OneDrive for Business), downloaded and set up. To give you a look at how it looks set up, I’ve got a snippet of how I have my computer set up.
The first icon represents my SharePoint storage with Office 365 and OneDrive for Business. The second icon (both have ‘S’ for SharePoint’, represents my personal storage with OneDrive for Business. By the way, my storage limit will go up to 1TB in July, 2014!
The other two icons are my consumer OneDrive storage accounts. I have 2 Microsoft accounts that I use and I set them both up so I can save to either account. Nice.
Sharing documents with a link, especially large docs, is the best and fastest way to get documents to friends or co-workers. It doesn’t have to be Microsoft documents, you can share just about any kind of file with OneDrive.
Is your computer set up to use OneDrive? There are apps for Windows, iOS, Android, tablets and phones. It’s great to open my OneDrive app on my Surface and all my documents are there, just like they are on my desktop, laptop and phone. Save it on one device and it gets saved everywhere.