Best Tips And Tricks for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has become a powerful corporate chat application. Teams enjoy one significant advantage over competitors like Slack and Convo: It comes with a Business Essentials, Business Premium, or Enterprise Office 365 subscription, which means many companies already own it.

Customize Your Notifications

Microsoft Teams makes it simple for individuals that belong to numerous active channels to customize their notifications. If you won’t like to be disturbed or interrupted with alerts and you want to have the best experience possible on a chat channel, then you might want to customize your notifications. This is done by just clicking on your profile picture located in the right corner at the top and select the Notifications tab to set the alert type and frequency to your own preference.

Use SharePoint to Store and Share Files

SharePoint is highly integrated into Microsoft Teams. This feature allows many organizations to secure their file storage and collaborate on files shared. You and your team mates at your company can easily share files just by clicking on the Files tab via SharePoint and/or by accessing SharePoint files already shared to the platform.

Give Title to your chat exchanges

Giving a title to your chat especially when chatting with someone or your team member will make your chat exchanges show up easily when you do a search later on. Microsoft Teams makes it very convenient for you and your organization to give a name to your chat just by clicking the pencil on the top beside the member names and type in any title you would like to name your chat with.

Forward email messages into a channel

You can easily forward any email message into a channel just by clicking the ellipsis located next to any channel name and select ‘’Get email address’’. This will help generate an email address for the channel which you can then copy and use to forward anything you might want to add to the channel including Word docs, messages, and more.

Use the Mobile Apps for On-The-Go Messaging

Using these apps will help simplify things, with emphasis on team chats and channels with no lots of additional layers and features. Microsoft Teams also presents a lot of options to their users, since they can be run as a web app or a desktop client for Windows or Mac.

Integrate with Microsoft Planner for Simple Task Management

One of the advantages that Microsoft Teams has over competitors is that Microsoft apps can be easily used as Planner inside Microsoft Teams. This allows you to reference the tracked tasks via Planner without a need for any third-party task manager. You can also use Teams to ‘’pin’’ the Planner app to any channel for easier accessibility in one click. This will make Planner displayed as a tab at the top of the channel.

Allow External Guest Users In Teams

You can as well invite guests into your fold via an Outlook account in order to chat, exchange documents, and more. You can then find anyone at your organization by searching for their name to initiate a chat.

Breakdown Language Barriers

With Microsoft Teams, language barriers have become a thing of the past. With the click of a button, you can translate messages in various languages inside Microsoft Teams. This is simply done by clicking on the ellipses on the message you want to translate and select Translate to translate the message into your default language.

Create Your Own GIFs

Animated GIFs also make chats more fun for you and your team members when put to use. Microsoft Teams features tons of animated GIFs that you can pick from and sprinkle into your chats. You can also use the Giphy app to create your own version of animated GIFs, this allows you and your team members to add an additional layer of personalization to the team chat. To enjoy the use of Giphy, it needs to be activated by the Teams administrator.

Urgent Chat Notifications

How to use it? When being inside any chat, click on the exclamation sign above the dialog window and select ‘Urgent’ in the message status options menu. This will make the system send notifications to the respondent every 2 minutes during the next 20 minutes.

Save Screencasts During Meetings

To use this feature, click on 3 dots in the menu of your call and select the ‘Start Recording’ option. In case you want to record a screencast just click on the icon ‘’Share Screen’ in the same menu. After a call, the saved video of your screencast will be available to download from your meeting chat.

Also Read : Essential MS Teams Keyboard Shortcuts

Transcribe Teams Meetings

Under the details of this video in Microsoft Stream click on the three dots button -> Update Video Details -> Select ‘Video Language’ section -> Click ‘Autogenerate a caption file’ -> Click ‘Update’ button. After autogenerating is completed, the file will become available to download from the Microsoft Streams section.

Bookmark Important Messages from Teams Chats

Save or bookmark important messages, conversation mentions getting quick access to them when needed. To bookmark it, simply tap on the bookmark icon in the app, and to later find it, type in the Search Bar /saved and press the Enter key.

Create Rich-text Messages

Sometimes rich-text messages really help to better structure information and make it easier to view and to understand. To compose the rich-text message, go to a channel from where you need the message to be sent, tap the ‘A’ button on the bottom left. After tapping you’ll see a text window pop-up, where you can add and format the needed text, and to send it when ready.

Linux Support

Another interesting feature in Teams is that it’s supported on Linux now. Actually, it’s the first client in the entire Microsoft 365 suite that has been released on Linux. Now, Linux users can switch from the web-based Teams to a Linux client offering them all the core possibilities and features that clients on other platforms provide.

Meeting Roles

Meeting organizers can now choose between 3 roles (Organizer, Presenter, and Attendee) for participants. The chart below identifies what roles carry which capabilities when utilizing roles in Microsoft Teams meetings.

Chrome Video Calling

Using Chrome, Teams users can initiate and accept video call with other MS Teams users. Now this feature is available to everybody.If you really want to get the most out of Microsoft Teams,

Mark A Message As Unread

In Teams, you can mark a message as unread so you can come back to it later.
Click on the three ellipses in the top left corner of the message and select Mark as unread.
When you need to find your bookmarked messages, then you can use the /unread command from the search bar to access all your saved messages.

Search Bar Commands

The search bar at the top of Teams is also a command bar. You can perform a lot of actions using the / commands from here. Instead of clicking into the search bar and typing out the command, you can use the Ctrl + / command to move the focus to the search bar and list out all the available commands.

Drag And Drop Teams Or Hide Channels

This is a quick and easy tip that will help you keep your Teams and Channels organized.You can drag and drop Teams around your team list so you can have your most used teams at the top.

Add A Custom Tab

Tabs are a great way to customize and add additional functionality to your channels in Teams.You can add a custom tab in any channel in order to use additional apps. Click on the plus sign to the right of all the channel tabs. This will allow you to browse all the available apps you can add to the tab.

Activity Center And Filters

The best way to stay up to date with all your Teams activity is to use the activity center.This will show you a timeline feed of all your activity and notifications.You can then search your activity feed by text search or filter on it to show only certain types of activity like reactions or mentions etc…Go to the Activity center in the left navigation pane then click on the Filter icon. You can either Type to filter or click the three dots to filter by type of activity.

Record Or Share Screens In Team Meetings

Team meetings are one of the best things in Teams and you can make them even better with these two features.Click on the three ellipse in the floating bar menu and select Start recording to record your team meeting.Click on the Share Screen icon in the floating bar menu to share your screen with meeting participants. This will allow you to share anything on a particular screen or just a particular window you have open.

Pin A Channel

You can pin any channel in your Teams. This will place the channel at the top of your list of Teams.This is a great option for your most frequently used channels as they will be easier to access when they’re pinned to the top of the list.

Pin An App

When an app you have installed in Microsoft Teams is active, its icon will appear in the left navigation pane. But when you navigate away the icon will disappear.You can pin any app to the navigation pane so it’s always visible and accessible from there.Right click on the app’s icon and select Pin from the options.

Private Channels

This feature allows users to create new channels within Microsoft Teams that already exist, but can choose to allow access to only members selected by private channel creator. This will allow facilitating communication between certain assigned people without creating a brand new team. Lock icons will indicate if a channel is private or not, and members of the private channel will only be able to see who and partake in conversations within that channel.

Pop Out Window

Microsoft has finally released the ability to pop out a chat into a separate window. This will allow for work, chats, calls, remote sessions to sit side-by-side with other apps being used.

Conclusion: With an ever-growing feature list and many ways to integrate apps from your day-to-day life, Teams has evolved to become the place where work gets done. Microsoft Teams is far more than a team collaboration app.