Many organizations use Microsoft SharePoint sites for document sharing and collaboration. Let's see how we can save a document directly to a SharePoint library from Microsoft Word and then send a link to that document to our colleagues who need to review it. So we have our Two Trees Olive Oil draft ready to share with others, and it's ready to be reviewed by other people over the next week or so. If I mail this as an attachment, I'll need to deal with the multiple review copies of the document.

But more importantly, my reviewers won't be able to see each other's changes. I would rather post it to our team's new SharePoint site so that my reviewers can collaborate more effectively. I'm going to choose File and go Backstage, choose a Save & Send and choose Save to SharePoint. Now, this is a brand-new site, so I don't have any history of saving to it. It's not listed in my Save to SharePoint list, and I'll be forced to Browse for a location.

When I double-click here, or when I click Save As, either event is going to open the Save As dialog box. And I can type in a URL, but what I'd rather do is actually go open the library on my site that I want to save in. So I'm on my Two Trees Olive Oil site. This is going to be saved in the new Human Resources area, and I want to copy this URL so that I can give it to Microsoft Word in that Save As dialog box. Now, I can copy the whole thing.

There is something though that you'll get used to as you work with SharePoint, which is at the end of the URL, where it says, Forms/AllItems.aspx, this is actually the view of the library. We don't need that part of the name, but we need all the rest of it. So I can either copy here, only what I need, or can copy the whole thing and then Cut in that dialog box. It's a lot easier to copy here so I'm just going to Copy this text, return to Microsoft Word and where has File name, I'm going to drop in that URL and press Enter.

This is going to connect to SharePoint. I'll be prompted for some credentials, at least the first time, and say OK and now I am in my Human Resources library. While there was a document in there, it doesn't show up here because it was a PowerPoint document, and I'm in Microsoft Word, and it says no documents of this type are in the library. So here's my document name. It's going to my SharePoint site, the Human Resources Library, and I'm going to click Save to save this document to my SharePoint site.

It will be uploaded to the server, and it's there. I'm going to go back to my SharePoint site now briefly, and I'm going to Refresh this library, and you'll notice here's my Two Trees Handbook posted and when it was last modified. So I can click the Open menu to see what I can do with this document, and one of my choices is to E-mail a Link to this document. So I'm going to do that. I have some other people who I would like to have review the document, so I can simply address this to all of the people that I need to have review this document.

I can add any other notes that I wish, and I can send this to my reviewers. That way they don't have another copy of the document sitting in their Inbox, but as Maria and Hector and Raul go and work on the document on SharePoint, all of their changes will be kept in one place. So I can just click Send in order to send this off, and I'm all set. So by saving my document on SharePoint, instead of having four copies of the document roaming around and having to sort them all later when they come back, I have one consistent review being conducted by three people, because I saved my document by going backstage in Word 2010 and putting it on our SharePoint site.