Top 8 Microsoft Teams Tips to Use Like a Pro

Slack has changed the messaging game since its debut in August 2013. It has replaced email for internal communication in many teams and organizations. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams combined Slack with the Office 365 service, surpassing Slack with over 13 million users.

It also benefits from the robust ecosystem Microsoft has built over the years. If your office setup or organization has an Office 365 subscription, communicating and collaborating through Teams becomes effortless.

Let’s take a look at some of the best tips and tricks for Microsoft Team users to increase their productivity and use it like a pro.

1. Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts can save a lot of time, especially when using an app like Teams. You will probably use it all day to communicate with your colleagues. As a beginner, there are only two shortcuts you need to remember for now.

1. / — the slash key will reveal any commands you can issue using various keyboard shortcuts.
2. /keys — a list of all the keyboard shortcuts you can use. The list is too long to share here. Find and remember those that are useful to you.

As seen in the screenshot, you will type these two shortcuts in the top search bar to find what you are looking for.

2. Group Name

Chat is the primary feature of Microsoft Teams, but searching for a specific conversation within a channel can be difficult. You can solve this problem by giving this chat window or group a meaningful name. For example, if you are discussing a new guide on Product A, you could name the chat window Product A Bugs. It makes future searching easier.

To do this, simply click the pencil icon at the top of the chat window to edit it and then give it a name. It only works for group chats, not private ones.

3. Forward Emails

At GT we hardly use email and we mostly rely on Slack to communicate with each other. It works for us, but it doesn’t mean you can eliminate emails completely. Emails are here to stay. Microsoft knows this and therefore allows users to forward emails with attachments to Team channels from any whitelisted email domain.

Not only that, if you click on Advanced settings on the next screen, you can control who can send emails and that from certain domains to reduce spam.

4. Create GIFs

Sharing GIFs is fun, but creating them is even more fun. I’m glad that Teams lets members create their own GIFs, get creative, and relieve stress to balance serious discussions.

Teams integrates Giphy, a popular GIF destination for sharing your artwork with other team members.

5. Boots

Automating repetitive tasks saves time and bots can be useful. Teams has a number of bots that you can use to your advantage. The Who bot is useful for finding team members across the organization based on their roles and responsibilities. For example, who is the lead product X marketer?

Bots act just like team members; this means you can chat with them, ask them questions and answer them.

Other bots include the Calendar bot to find an open spot on your and your team members’ calendars and appointment scheduling, Polly to create surveys and gather feedback, and YellowAnt to connect with more than 40 apps to create smart workflows. Here’s how you can create your own bots.

6. Tabs

Teams comes with a unique feature called Tabs. You can separate each tab into a single resource, which can be a video, website, or app. It depends on what you want to achieve with this. I think it’s best suited for the apps you want to use when working with Teams.

Tabs make it really easy to manage the workflow and prevent important parts of the process from overlapping. For example, you can create a tab for Trello so everyone on the team can easily access it. To select an app, simply click the ‘+’ icon. Note that there is already a tab for sharing files.

7. Bookmark

A small but often neglected feature of Teams is the bookmark option. If you receive an important message but want to get back to it later, you can bookmark it and take care of it later.

To do this, click the menu icon next to the message.

8. Immersive Reader

Did someone share a document with you? You can use the Immersive Reader option to do two things instead of reading the whole thing. Remove any distractions so that only the text appears. Makes it easier to focus on the document or message.

You can also listen to the document with highlighted words in real time. Another great feature is translation. You can select a message and translate it into more than 60 languages ​​using Microsoft Translator.

Teamwork All the Way

Microsoft Teams is a great collaboration tool, and it wouldn’t be wiser if you’re already working with other Microsoft products like Office 365. We hope some of the tips we shared above will help you be more productive.

Next: Is your Outlook Inbox getting out of control? Click the link below to learn how to use rules to manage Outlook 365.