How to connect Microsoft 365 and create your first FreeCRiM workbook

FreeCRiM has no sign-up form for a CRM database, because there is no CRM database - just your Microsoft 365 account and an Excel workbook inside it. Getting started is two steps: connect the account, then create or pick the file.

Step 1: Connect Microsoft 365

The first time you reach the app, FreeCRiM asks you to connect Microsoft 365. This is Microsoft's own consent screen, not a form FreeCRiM controls: you sign in the way you always do, and Microsoft asks whether FreeCRiM may read your profile and read and write files. Declining, or connecting a different account later, is always available from the same screen.

FreeCRiM never sees or stores your Microsoft password. What it stores afterwards is an encrypted access grant it uses to open the one workbook you choose - not a general-purpose key to your whole account.

Step 2: Create or pick the workbook

Once connected, you choose one of two paths:

• Create a new workbook. FreeCRiM builds a fresh Excel file from its own template - the Companies, Contacts, Deals and Activities sheets already set up with their columns, dropdowns and formulas - and saves it wherever in OneDrive or SharePoint you pick.
• Pick an existing workbook. If a teammate already created your team's FreeCRiM workbook, you browse to the same file instead of making a second one. FreeCRiM checks the file has the shape it expects before adding you to it.

Either way, once a workbook is chosen it is the one FreeCRiM reads and writes for your account from then on.

What happens next

The workbook is real the moment it is created or picked - open it directly in Excel and the Companies, Contacts, Deals and Activities sheets are already there, with their dropdowns and formulas, described in full in what's inside the FreeCRiM workbook.