Tips and tricks to help you make the most of Microsoft Teams
Over the past couple of years, I’ve come across a number of shortcuts and not-so-obvious features in Microsoft Teams that save time and help to maximise the Teams experience.
Take a look at my top tips and tricks that you can start incorporating today!
1. Teams Command Bar
The command bar in Teams has to be one of my favourite features – so much so that I’ve already covered it in detail in this post. But to summarise, by entering a forward slash into the command bar, you can quickly access commands and functions such as changing your availability status, or quickly opening a specific Team or channel.
2. Keyboard shortcuts
Become a Teams super user by nailing these keyboard shortcuts. You can view them all by typing /keys into the command bar, but here are some of my favourites:
Ctrl + shift + M – Mute/unmute yourself
Ctrl + Shift + O - Turn your camera on/off
Ctrl + N – Start a new chat
Ctrl + E - Go to the Search bar
Ctrl + = to zoom in or Ctrl + - to zoom out
3. @Mentions
If you need to get someone’s attention in a channel conversation or chat, @mention is a great way to do this. Simply type @ before typing and selecting their name. The recipient will then receive a notification that will take them directly to where they were mentioned.
4. Change your background in a meeting
Whether you’re working from home and want to hide the pile of washing behind you, or you just want a change of background scenery, Teams allows you to change your meeting background.
You can do this as you enter a meeting by clicking on “Background Filters” under your video, or during the meeting just hit “Meeting controls > More actions > Apply Background effects”. You can choose from the Teams default backgrounds, or even upload your own!
5. Managing notifications
This is another one I’ve covered in detail here. Managing your notifications is a great way to make sure you don’t miss anything important or drown in notification overload! You can do this at a global level via Settings > Notifications, or at a channel level by clicking the elipses next to a channel and clicking Channel notifications.
6. Search Through Your Conversations
As you become a member of an increasing number of Teams and produce more and more content, Search will become an essential tool for you.
When using the search bar, you can switch between “Messages”, “People” and “Files” by clicking the tabs, depending on what you are looking for.
You can also get more advanced by using Keywords in your search, such as:
“From:” then enter the person’s name
“In:” then enter the channel or group chat name
“Subject:” the keyword from a message or a subject line
“Sent:” the date the message was sent
Remember not to include a space between the semi-colon and the search word.
7. Give your chats a Title
Channels can carry thousands of threaded conversations. Luckily, Microsoft Teams makes it easy for you to tag your chats with memorable, more searchable titles so you can easily find them again in the future.
In your chat tab, select the pencil next to the member names at the top and type in a title that relates to the content of the chat and will help you find it again. Easy!
8. GIFs
Microsoft Teams comes equipped with lots of GIFs you can add to your chats and conversations to add some personality and humour to your chats, in the absence of in-person communication and body language.
In any chat or conversation thread, simply select the GIF icon to scroll through or search specifically for a GIF to enhance your message!
9. Praise
Who doesn’t love the occasional shout out for their hard work or extra mile? Just as with GIFs, it’s really easy to praise your colleagues in a chat or conversation by clicking the Praise icon, selecting a category and entering your colleagues’ name.
10. Translation
Microsoft has included an easy way of translating messages. Just hover your cursor over the foreign-language message, click on the ellipsis (...) and then select Translate.
Microsoft Teams also includes translation for video calls. From the Translate to menu you can add captions to share content in up to 6 languages. Anyone attending can turn on live captions by clicking Subtitles On in the lower right hand corner of their screen
11. Use SharePoint
As you may be aware, at the back end of every Teams site is an integrated SharePoint site for storing and sharing files.
In the Files tab of any Channel, you can click “Open in SharePoint” to go directly to the linked SharePoint site.
This also means you get all the awesome Document management capabilities that SharePoint has to offer including metadata and workflows.
12. Email Forwarding to a Channel
It may have fallen out of fashion a little, but email is still used by lots of people everyday. For this reason, Microsoft Teams has made it really easy for you to forward an email to any Teams channel you like.
Simply click the ellipses next to a channel name and then click “Get email address”. This creates an email address for the channel that you can now use to email anything directly. Emails sent to the address will show up in the channel in the same way as a new conversation.
13. Urgent Chat Notifications
This is the digital equivalent of banging loudly on an office door! To send an Urgent Message Notification, look below the text compose box and select the exclamation mark icon, and you’ll be able to check your message as Urgent. This will notify the recipient every 2 minutes for the following 20 minutes – making it hard to ignore!
14. Save a message for future reference
Just hover over any message and click the ellipsis (…), then click Save this message. To view saved messages type /Saved in the search box followed by Enter. They will appear in the left pane. From here you can also unsave messages via the bookmark icon that appears in the top right of each message.
15. Conduct Polls & Surveys
You can easily create polls and surveys in any Teams channel by clicking the Forms icon under the message box.
Type in your questions then click Send to share your survey – easy!
16. Private Channels
A Private channel is a restricted part of a Team that’s only available to a subset of Team members. These are useful if confidential discussions need to take place away from the view of all team members.
To create a Private channel, click “Add Channel”, then in the Privacy drop down select “Private”.
Your private channel will have a lock icon next to it:
Just note that a Private channel also commissions a separate SharePoint site in the back end, so only create these if there is a need to.
17. Adding Tabs to Channels
Tabs let you quickly connect users with important documents, links or third-party apps. A bit like bookmarks or shortcuts.
To add a tab to a channel Select “+” at the top of the channel, select a tab and follow the steps. The tab will appear at the top of the channel.
18. Pinning a Team or a channel and chats
Pinning is a great way for you to easily access the chats and channels you access the most, by pinning them to the top of your list of Teams and Chats.
To pin a channel, click the ellipses and click “Pin”. And similarly in Chat, click the ellipses next to your team members names and click “Pin”
19. Format a post
When you start a new conversation in a channel, you can format the way it looks by clicking the Format icon. This will reveal extra configurations for your post such as setting a banner or title, posting to multiple channels at once, including a banner image or inserting links.
Teams is an ever evolving tool, so I’d love to hear of any other tips you’ve come across that have helped your efficiency and productivity in Teams!