In this month’s guest blog, we’d like to that Jenna and the team at Appetite For Business.
Appetite recently launched CUBE which is an amazing Microsoft Training Package which is done via a subscription, and I asked Jenna if she’d be able to share her top tips with us, on working within Teams – a collaboration tool which has become increasingly popular during the pandemic with more teams working from home and needing to collaborate remotely. I hope you find it useful – you can find out more about the subscription at the end of the blog.
It’s Good To Chat – 6 Top Tips for Chatting in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams has revolutionised how we work remotely – Teams users have amazing functionality at their fingertips with hundreds of apps and evolving features to make it easier to share and collaborate!
While many of us are now using Teams every day, it’s safe to assume we’re not using the full spectrum of features. One we certainly will be using however, is Chat.
Alongside meetings, Chat will probably be one of the functions in Teams used most by you and whether chatting directly with an individual or posting in group channels, there are multiple ways to chat with clients and colleagues in Teams.
Here are some great tips and best practices to get the most out of the chat function in Teams!
Pop Out Chat
One of the newer features of chat is the Pop Out chat feature. Teams now allows you to pop out a chat into a separate window so you can keep your conversation going on your screen while working in Teams or in other applications. This lets you be more efficient while multitasking!
There are several ways to pop out a chat:
- Double click on the chat from your main Teams list
- Double click someone’s profile photo
- Go to the chat in your Teams list and select the pop out chat icon
- Use keyboard shortcut “/pop” in the search bar
Which way do you prefer?
Starting A New Line
One frustration in Teams Chat is hitting ENTER and sending your message when all you meant to do was start a new line, I’m sure we’ve all done it!
To insert a line break while responding in a chat you can use the shortcut SHIFT+ENTER. You can also open the Formatting Options, which will allow you to use ENTER as normal to start a new line. Which brings me to…
Formatting
As well as basic text in chat, Teams offers a formatting function that lets your Teams Chat look and feel more like an email. Here you can change the colour, style and size of your text to really make it stand out on screen.
This is especially useful when chatting within Teams channels where larger groups can read your posts.
Did you know you can even insert hyperlinks and tables to share information through your chat?
Reactions
While formatting makes your text pop on the page, using the built in reactions of Teams gives you a quick way to respond to your fellow Team members, or let them know you’ve acknowledged their message, without lots of replies going back and forth.
You can react to a message from a teammate using one of 6 different emojis. As well as the universal ‘thumbs up’ to acknowledge a message, you can choose Love, Laugh, Surprise, Sad and Annoyance.
And where one of these 6 reactions is not expressive enough, you can use GIFs to share your feelings with your teammates!
Whilst it’s not always appropriate to use GIFs with clients, this feature adds a little fun to the Teams platform and will help you express any emotion necessary!
Put Your Chat on Mute
Sometimes notifications from Chat, DMs and Channels can be annoying if they are continuous and not relevant to what you are working on. If you don’t want to delete the conversation but want to stop notifications, you can put your chat on Mute.
Simply open the chat, select More Options and choose MUTE to remain notification free!
Quick Search
As you spend more time in Teams you will find you may acquire many different chats and group channels. What happens when you can’t find a specific item of information or an instruction you were given?
There are a few ways to search for what you need:
Use the search box at the top of the Teams interface and search for keywords – Teams will give you a list of results containing that keyword.
You can use Filter in your Activity feed:
This allows you to narrow your search down by certain types of activity:
You can also save messages for future reference if you think it will be important or you don’t have the time to deal with properly right now. You can save any chat message by clicking on it and selecting save from the options menu:
So, there you have it – 6 great ways to optimize your Teams Chat!
Unlock your full Microsoft 365 potential with CUBE
As a PA and EA, training was very thin on the ground unless you arranged it yourself and the only Microsoft training available was by attending a workshop, or e-learning.
Now I don’t do well with e-learning but where Appetite are offering something different is the CUBE membership comes with all the support from the CUBE team, which includes regular webinars, training sessions and Q&As plus a forum where you can ask for support if there is something you can’t work out how to do, and this at all only £27 per month!
As you can tell, I’m loving this!
Join the community today and have access to the extensive learning platform covering Microsoft 365, the supportive community and monthly webinars giving you more hacks and best practices to integrate into your working day. Work smarter, work in a better way: https://m365cube.com/