Slack has changed the messaging game since its debut in August 2013. It has replaced email for internal communication within many teams and organizations. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams has overtaken Slack with over 13 million users by pairing it with the Office 365 service.
Contents1. Keyboard shortcuts2. Group name3. Forward emails4. Create GIFs5. Bots6. Tabs7. Bookmark8. Immersive readerTeamwork to the end
Plus, it benefits from Microsoft's robust ecosystem built over the years. If your office setup or organization has the Office 365 subscription, communication and collaboration through Teams becomes effortless.
Let's take a look at some of the best tips and tricks for Microsoft Team users to boost their productivity and use it like a pro.
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. There are only two shortcuts you need to remember as a beginner for now.
As shown in the screenshot, you will type these two shortcuts in the search bar at the top to find what you are looking for.
Chat is a core feature of Microsoft Teams, but finding a particular conversation in a channel can be tricky. 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 might name the chat window Product A Bugs. Makes searching easier in the future.
To do this, simply click the pencil icon at the top of the chat window to edit it, then give it a name. Only works for group chats, not private.
At GT, we barely use email and mostly rely on Slack to communicate with each other. This works for us, but doesn't mean you can completely get rid of emails. Emails are here to stay. Microsoft knows this, and that's why it allows users to forward emails with attachments to Teams channels from any whitelisted email domain.
Not only that, if you click Advanced Settings on the next screen, you can control who can send emails, and that too from specific domains, to reduce spam emails.
Sharing GIFs is fun, but creating them is even more so. I'm glad Teams allows members to create their own GIFs, allowing them to be creative and reduce stress to balance serious discussions.
Teams integrates Giphy, a popular GIF destination, to share your artwork with other team members.
Automating repetitive tasks saves time, and bots can be helpful. 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 marketing manager for product X?
Bots act like team members, which means you can chat with them, ask them questions, and they'll answer you.
Other bots include Calendar bot for finding a free slot in your and team members' calendars and scheduling appointments, Polly for creating polls and collecting feedback, and YellowAnt for logging into over 40 apps to create intelligent workflows. Here's how you can create your own bots.
Teams comes with a unique feature called Tabs. You can dedicate each tab to a single resource which can be a video, website or app. It depends on what you want to achieve with it. I think it's best suited for the apps you want to use when working with Teams.
Tabs make it easier 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. Simply click on the ‘+’ icon to choose an application. Note that there is already a tab for file sharing.
A small but often overlooked feature of Teams is the bookmark option. If you receive an important message but want to come back to it later, you can just bookmark it and deal with it later.
Click the menu icon next to the message to do so.
Has anyone shared a document with you? Instead of reading it in its entirety, you can use the Immersive Reader option to do two things. Remove all distractions so that only the text is visible. Makes it easy to focus on the document or message.
You can also listen to the document with highlighted words in real time. Another cool feature is translation. You can select a message and translate it into over 60 languages using Microsoft Translator.
Microsoft Teams is an amazing collaboration tool, and a no-brainer if you already work with other Microsoft products like Office 365. Hopefully some of the tips we've shared above will help you be more productive.
Then: Is your Outlook inbox spinning out of control? Click the link below to learn how to use rules to manage Outlook 365.
