In this step-by-step tutorial, learn how to best present Microsoft PowerPoint slides in Microsoft Teams.⌚ Timestamps0:00 Introduction1:58 Example of the prob. Microsoft Teams for Education Help drive the transition to inclusive online or hybrid learning, build confidence with remote learning tools, and maintain student engagement. Microsoft Teams was introduced in 2017 as a unified communication and collaboration platform, helping businesses and organizations get things done. Microsoft leveraged the company’s existing Office. Microsoft Teams has become one of the go-to apps for online collaboration with the surge in people working from home. For many users, setting the app up has been simple. For others, the app’s unconventional set up is confusing. Microsoft Teams account/license. Microsoft Teams can be used for free, or with an enterprise license.
With over 100 million daily users, Microsoft Teams gained much popularity during the pandemic as the standard online collaboration tool for business. So, either if you are still trying to grasp the basics or already a seasoned user, this comprehensive list of tips and tricks will help you make the most of Microsoft Teams – now.
So without further ado, let’s get started with this master list of 40 tips and tricks that every Microsoft Teams user should be aware of.
Getting started with Microsoft Teams
1. Change your Teams theme
Did you know that you can change the look and feel of Microsoft Teams?
Simply open Teams settings, navigate to the General tab and choose whether to use the traditional white background or alternatively apply the dark or high contrast modes.
2.Mute your Audio
Are you sometimes late to your meeting and want to join quietly, or simply need to take an important call from your significant other, while on a Teams meeting?
Teams allows you to mute your mic both from the meeting controls (shown above) and the meeting setup panel (shown as item 1 below).
3.Turn off your camera
In the same fashion you can turn on and off you video camera. You can either use the meeting setup panel (item 2 above) to disable your camera; or simply use the meeting control panel to enable video again.
4.Blur your meeting video background
If you use Teams for video meetings, this might sound familiar. Your home office is a mess and you need to join this video call. Two solutions for that: first off, you can use the Background Settings function (item 3 above) to blur your video background right on from the meeting setup or the meeting controls. The second solution is way more elegant : use a virtual background (we’ll go through the process later).
If for some reason, the Background setting button seems inactive in the Meeting Setup panel; make sure you turn on your video camera first.
5.Stop the echo in Teams meetings
When you and other meeting participants join an audio or video Teams meeting from the same room, you will hear annoying echoes. You can easily get rid of the echo by hitting the Audio off button in the Meeting Setup panel (show above as item 4).
6.Record your meeting
One important capability of Teams that you might want to use from the get-go is the ability to record a meeting. You can initiate a recording from the Meeting control panel as shown below. The recording itself is then kept in Microsoft Stream, and you can easily share the recording as a link in a Channel conversation (or by email if needed).
7. Change your team icon
Teams allow to brand your Team, by allowing you to upload a custom picture and set it as your team icon. More details can be found in this tutorial.
8.Create a private channel
There are cases in which you’ll need to collaborate with others on tasks requiring confidentiality, such as preparing a budget or sales analysis reports. Private channels allow you to establish a collaboration platform with selected team members. The private channel will be visible only to those invited and will be marked with a small lock in your Teams list.
Creating a private channel is straightforward: just hit the More Options button (…) next to your Team, then hit Add Channel. Next define the channel information as shown below. Lastly, add team members to the private channel.
9.Mute notifications from noisy channels
These days, we all seem to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of incoming notifications from collaboration platforms and email. It’s often difficult to actually produce something meaningful beyond never ending chattiness . Luckily, Teams makes it relatively simple for us to calibrate the influx of notification alerts and sounds we get. Here’s a guide on how to mute Teams chat and meeting alerts.
10.Leave a Team
If you see no benefit in being part of a team, you can easily exit. Hit the More Options button next to the team you would like to leave and pick Leave the Team.
11.Use Teams on Mobile
If you need to access Teams whenever on the go, you can use Teams also on mobile. Microsoft shipped pretty good Teams apps for Android and iOS. Talk to your Information Technology colleagues to find out whether you’ll need additional software or authentication procedure to access your company’s Teams content on mobile.
12.Install and uninstall an app in Teams
Beyond basic collaboration, Teams allows you to enhance your team work by using either Microsoft or 3rd party apps. In the next sections of this tutorial, you’ll see several usages of Apps in Teams: Images, Weather, Reporting, Polls, Note Taking etc’.
If you are a Team Owner, you can easily install and uninstall Apps which were made available by your Information Technology administrators.
Process is fairly simple: Locate your team, then hit the More Options button next to it, and then pick the Manage Team cog. Then in Apps tab, hit the More Apps button to search and install your new App. Applications specific to a Channel can be added as tabs in the channel
13.Cancel read receipts
By default, every time you read a message in the Chat application, Teams places a small icon next to the message. This helps the sender acknowledge that you have read their message. You can cancel read receipts in the Privacy tab of your Teams Settings.
14.Using Filters to find stuff quickly
Want to speed up finding specific Activities in your feed as well as specific Chats, Teams and Channels? Use the Teams filter (shown below) or use the Ctrl+Shift+F shortcut.
The filter function allows to quickly find relevant entry by name; for Chats it also allow to quickly find muted, hidden and unread entries with ease.
15.Set an Away message
Same as in Outlook, Teams allows you to compose an Out-of-the Office away message that will be sent if someone sends you a message in Teams or mentions you in a chat.
Simply hit your Teams avatar, the hit the Set status Message, then write your message and specify the validity period. Hit Done and you’ll be all set.
Moving beyond the basics
16.Use Teams commands
As you get a bit more experienced with Teams, you might want to boost your productivity by using Search box commands.
To get started, simple type the forward slash character (/) in the Teams Search box and browse the list of available commands:
The command list is pretty self explanatory and the ones i fing to be the most useful are:
- /goto: To easily access a team or channel
- /keys: To access Teams list of shortcuts
- /chat: to quickly start a chat with one of your colleagues
17.Use a custom virtual background
I guess you have noticed people joining Teams video calls using city or nature landscapes as backdrops for their video calls. You can use pretty much every picture as a custom background in Teams calls. Feel free to look into our simple guide on how to setup virtual Teams backgrounds for your call.
18.Take Notes in a meeting
Teams has several ways for you to take meeting notes.
You can easily add OneNote notebooks stored in OneDrive or a network drive and have your channel members share notes and notes. I have also seen people using the Posts tab and add their notes as chat messages. I have seen others attaching Word files to the meeting or to the Channel files tab. There are also third party apps that you can use.
That said, the proper method is to use the Notes tab that is automatically enabled for your meeting.
- Navigate to the Chat app.
- Click on your meeting.
- Navigate to the Notes tab and hit the Take Notes button.
- Log the meeting minutes there.
- Point the meeting participants to your notes as needed.
19.Access your unread activity
Similarly to Microsoft Outlook, Teams clearly marks any unread messages in bold. Moreover, you are able to mark Teams messages as unread for later follow up. But how do you easily access those unread messages and activities? Simple type the /unread command in your Teams Search bar, and have Teams retrieve only unread messages for you to process.
20.Delete or hide chat conversations
Teams allow you to delete messages from a conversation thread. It also allows you to hide complete chat entries in your Chats app (just hit the … button and then choose Hide). Teams doesn’t currently end users you to completely delete entire threads from the Chat History though.
21.Troubleshoot your Outlook teams connection
If you are both a Microsoft Outlook and Teams user, you are most probably scheduling Teams meetings right from your Outlook Calendar meeting using the Teams Add-in.
But what if for some reason, the Teams button is not available in Outlook, even though Teams is properly installed on your Windows computer?
Most probably the reason is that the Teams Add-in is disabled. Take a look at our tutorial on how to easily turn on Teams in Microsoft Outlook.
22.Embed Word and Excel files in your Channel
You can easily share files with your colleagues by uploading to the Files tab in a channel. You can however ease access to the file by simply embedding it as tab in your Channel. This works not only for Excel or Word, but also for OneNote notebooks, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents and so forth.
23.View your colleague reporting line
If you work in big organizations, you might need to identify the organizational reporting line of a colleague. As Teams is well integrated with Azure Active Directory and Exchange, you are able to easily look into your colleagues org chart.
Simply go to your Teams Search box, type the shortcut /org and your colleague name and you’ll be all set.
Note: You won’t be able to look up the org chart in Teams for people outside your company.
24.Set your status (/dnd) , (/brb), (/available)
Want to manually set your status, so others know when to contact you. This can be done from the Teams settings, but as you gain more experience with Teams, you will start setting your status from the Search box.
Simply use /dnd for Do not Disturb or /brb for Be Right Back and hit Enter. Your status will change. Just remember to reset your status as needed.
25. Access your meeting recordings
As we learnt before, you are able to easily record your Teams meetings. Once the meeting is done, you’ll receive an email with a link to your recording in Microsoft Stream.
If you initiated your meeting from the channel, a link to the recording will be also made available as a post in the respective channel.
Ad-hoc meetings recordings will be available in the Chat tab for the meeting itself, alongside with an file exchanged, meeting notes and whiteboard if used.
You might as well consider adding the Stream app to your channel so fellow members, can easily access all meetings pertaining to the group.
26.Access your data on SharePoint
Your Teams channel data is available as a dedicated library on Microsoft SharePoint which is widely used document portal that is used as the infrastructure for Teams document storage.
In order to access your SharePoint library, simply navigate to your channel, then hit the Files tab and then hit Open in SharePoint.
27. Add the weather to Teams
Similar to Outlook, which allows you to display the weather conditions in your area, you can use Teams to get up to speed with the weather whereabouts.
If the Weather app is not yet installed on your local Teams client, then:
- Open Teams, hit the Apps button at the left side App bar,
- Search for and add the Weather app into Teams.
- Then, in the Teams main Search bar type /weather and the relevant location.
28.Make Teams your Default Chat App
After start using Teams, you might find it quite superior to Skype for Business. You can make Teams your default chat app for Outlook and other Office apps. Simply go to the Teams settings and then in the General tab, check the Register Teams as the default chat app for Office box.
The setting will take effect after all open Office apps are re-started.
29. Use Teams in Together Mode
A relatively new capability of Teams is to allow meetings in Together Mode. Instead of displaying all meeting participants’ camera feeds in the grid (gallery) view, you can show them side by side in a virtual setting (think classroom, library, movie theater etc’).
To enable Together mode you’ll need to first update Teams (hit your avatar, then Check for Updates). Then hit your avatar and hit Settings. In the general tab, check the New experience box:
Then in your meeting panel, hit the … button and select Together Mode.
Note that if you work in a large cooperation, you might not be able to manually update Microsoft Teams on your own. You might need to discuss enabling Together Mode with your Information Technology admin.
Expert Tricks
30.Get an email address for your channel
Once a channel a created you can post new messages into the channel Posts tab, directly from Outlook. For that you’ll need to locate your channel email address as following:
- Locate your channel and hit on the More Options button next to it.
- Hit Get email address.
- Copy the email address and add it as a Contact in Outlook
- Side notes:
- Teams Owners can determine whom can send emails to the channel (by clicking the Advanced Settings button).
- You can
31.Disable Teams from starting up when you launch Windows
Teams is absolutely great, but it can consume significant amount of computer resources, mainly RAM. If you run a business computer, you won’t notice an impact on your system performance. That said, if you run from a simple tablet, you might want to run Teams only when needed. When installed, Teams is configured to automatically start whenever you launch your computer. You can disable Teams from starting up when you boot your computer and launch it only in case it is required.
32.Publish polls and surveys in Teams
One of the most useful usages of Teams is to run polls and surveys. In a matter of 10 minutes you can create a custom poll using Microsoft Forms, or other third party software like Polly and post them in your Teams channel. This tutorial has everything you need to create your custom Teams surveys.
33.Embed a report in Teams
If your organization is using the Microsoft BI Platform, you can use Teams in order to distribute your reports. You can easily select and pin Power BI reports to a channel tab to ensure those are available to them for your data driven discussions.
How To Do Microsoft Teams Background
34.Lookup you favorite quote directly in Teams
Another cool way to use Teams in to lookup your stocks portfolio. Here’s how to do that:
- From the Apps tab, search and add the Stocks app into Teams.
- Then, from the search box, type Stocks and then the relevant stocks ticker/s as shown below.
- Once the Stocks application is enabled simply type the command @Stocks and the ticker in your search bar.
35.Search for Images in Teams
Another little known feature of Teams is that you can use it to search images in Bing. First off, go ahead and enable the Microsoft Images application in Teams.
Then, in your search bar, just type @Images + your search query to access Bing pictures search.
36.Use Teams to manage employee shifts
if you manage a group of employees working in shifts in retail, call center or even a small factory, you can use Teams in order to plan and share work schedules. The Shifts application that you can easily add to Teams, makes it very simple to manage the shifts schedule, receive schedule requests for PTO, medical leave or vacations from your colleagues and even allow them to clock in and out their shifts. You can then create employee attendance reports are needed. Cool!
37.Adding a Calendar
Visualizing and managing a shared calendar is probably another great potential usage for Teams. So far, Teams doesn’t provide a straightforward Outlook integration. That said, you can add a Website tab to your Teams channel and point to to either your your Outlook group Calendar or Google Calendar URL. Most probably users will need to input their user credentials in order to access the calendars.
38.Integrate Trello in Teams
Many teams use Trello kanban boards for a myriad of collaboration use cases. Those could span ongoing task management as well as more strategic planning of projects, products or programs. You can easily open Trello as an App in Teams by adding it using the Apps tab to access your relevant boards and cards. You can also add it as a 3rd party tab in your channel. Both will require to provide your Trello user credentials.
39.Start Cisco Webex Meetings from Teams
Microsoft and Cisco compete in the area in the area of Team communication and collaboration. Still, your company might be using both. Did you know that you can integrate Webex into your Teams Channel? There is a Webex app that you can easily add as into a Channel tab. The team members can then easily access their Webex meetings and join their own Webex meetings from Microsoft Teams. They are also able to schedule Webex meetings and have the Team notified via the Posts tab.
40.Access your Teams analytics
As a Team owner you might want to be able to monitor usage patters of your Team or Channel. If so:
- In the left hand side App bar, open the Teams tab.
- Then search for your team in the left hand side pane.
- Hit the More Settings button next to your team and hit the Manage Team cog.
- Then open the Analytics tab.
- From here you can preview your Team and Channel usage patterns, engagement metrics, disk space utilization etc’.
Hopefully you have enjoyed the post. If so, feel free to share with with friend and colleagues over social media. Know additional cool Teams tips and tricks? Feel free to post them in the comments! Thanks.
-->Overview of Tasks
The Tasks app brings a cohesive task management experience to Microsoft Teams, integrating individual tasks powered by Microsoft To Do and team tasks powered by Planner in one place. Users can access Tasks as an app on the left side of Teams and as a tab in a channel within individual teams. My tasks and Shared plans in Tasks let users view and manage all their individual and team tasks and prioritize their work. Tasks is available in Teams desktop, web, and mobile clients.
Note
As we roll out the Tasks experience on Teams desktop clients, the app name will initially appear as Planner to users. The name will then temporarily change to Tasks by Planner and To Do, and later on, it will be renamed to Tasks. On Teams mobile clients, users will always see the app name as Tasks. There may be a short delay in the availability of the mobile experience after the desktop experience is available.
For organizations who want to streamline task management for Frontline Workers, Tasks also includes capabilities that enable you to target, publish, and track tasks at scale across your Frontline Workforce. For example, corporate and regional leadership can create and publish task lists targeted to relevant locations, such as specific retail stores, and track progress through real-time reports. Managers can assign tasks to their staff and direct activities within their locations, and Frontline Workers have a prioritized list of their assigned tasks on mobile or desktop. To enable task publishing, you'll first need to set up a team targeting hierarchy for your organization, which defines how all teams in the hierarchy are related to each other.
What you need to know about Tasks
Tasks is available as an app and as a tab in a channel. Keep in mind that the app comprises both individual tasks from To Do and team tasks from Planner whereas the tab shows only team tasks.
With Tasks, users get a desktop, web, and mobile experience. If Tasks is installed on the Teams desktop client, users will also see it on their Teams web and mobile clients. The exception is guest users. It's important to know that guests can only access Tasks as an app from the Teams mobile client. Guests will see Tasks tabs on both Teams desktop and web clients.
My tasks shows a user's individual tasks. Shared plans show tasks that the whole team is working on and includes any task list that's added as a Tasks tab to a channel. Note the following:
Task lists that a user creates in the Tasks app will also appear in To Do clients for that user. Similarly, task lists that a user creates in To Do will appear in My tasks in Tasks for that user. The same is true for individual tasks.
Any Tasks tab that's added to a channel will also appear in Planner clients. When a user creates a plan in Planner, the plan won't show in the Tasks or Planner app unless it's added as a tab to a channel. When a user adds a new Tasks tab, they can create a new list or plan or choose an existing one.
Microsoft Teams And To Do
Set up Tasks
Important
Settings and policies that you configured for Planner will also apply to Tasks.
Enable or disable Tasks in your organization
Tasks is enabled by default for all Teams users in your organization. You can turn off or turn on the app at the org level on the Manage apps page in the Microsoft Teams admin center.
In the left navigation of the Microsoft Teams admin center, go to Teams apps > Manage apps .
In the list of apps, do one of the following:
- To turn off Tasks for your organization, search for the Tasks app, select it, and then click Block.
- To turn on Tasks for your organization, search for the Tasks app, select it, and then click Allow.
Note
If you can't find the Tasks app, search for the names in the first note of this article. The app could still be in the process of being renamed.
Enable or disable Tasks for specific users in your organization
To allow or block specific users in your organization from using Tasks, make sure Tasks is turned on for your organization on the Manage apps page, and then create a custom app permission policy and assign it to those users. To learn more, see Manage app permission policies in Teams.
Use an app setup policy to pin Tasks to Teams
App setup policies let you customize Teams to highlight the apps that are most important for users in your organization. The apps you set in a policy are pinned to the app bar—the bar on the side of the Teams desktop client and at the bottom of the Teams mobile clients—where users can quickly and easily access them.
To pin the Tasks app for your users, you can edit the global (Org-wide default) policy or create and assign a custom app setup policy. To learn more, see Manage app setup policies in Teams.
A user's My tasks is visible if the user is licensed for Exchange Online
If you don't want a user to see My tasks, you can hide it. To do this, remove the user's Exchange Online license. It's important to know that after you remove an Exchange Online license, the user no longer has access to their mailbox. Mailbox data is held for 30 days, after which the data will be removed and can't be recovered unless the mailbox is placed on In-Place Hold or Litigation Hold.
We don't recommend this for information workers, but there may be some scenarios where this could apply, such as for Frontline Workers who don't depend on email.
Task publishing
With task publishing, your organization can publish task lists targeted to specific locations (teams) across your organization to define and share a work plan to be completed at those locations.
- People on the publishing team, such as corporate or regional leadership, can create task lists and publish them to specific teams.
- Managers on the recipient teams can review the published task lists and assign individual tasks to team members.
- Frontline Workers have a simple mobile experience to see tasks assigned to them. They can attach photos to show their work when appropriate and mark their tasks as completed.
- Publishers and managers can view reports to see assignment and completion status of tasks at each level, including by location (team), task list, and individual task.
Users create, manage, and publish task lists on the Published lists tab in the Tasks app. This tab only shows for a user if your organization set up a team targeting hierarchy and the user is on a team that's included in the hierarchy. The hierarchy determines whether the user can publish or receive task lists and view reporting for received lists.
Example scenario
Here's an example of how task publishing works.
Contoso is rolling out a new food takeout and delivery promotion. To maintain a consistent brand experience, they need to coordinate consistent execution of the rollout across over 300 store locations.
The Marketing team shares the promotion details and the corresponding list of tasks with the Retail Communications Manager. The Retail Communications Manager, who serves as the gatekeeper for stores, reviews the information, creates a task list for the promotion, and then creates a task for each unit of work that needs to be performed by each of the affected stores. When the task list is complete, she needs to select the stores that must complete the work. In this case, the promotion only applies to stores in the United States that have an in-store restaurant. In Tasks, she filters the store list based on the in-store restaurant attribute, selects the matching United States locations in the hierarchy, and then publishes the task list to those stores.
Store managers at each location receive a copy of the published tasks and assign those tasks to their team members. Managers can use the Tasks experience to understand all the work required across their store. They can also use the available filters to focus on a specific set of work, such as work due today or work in a particular area.
Frontline Workers at each store location now have a prioritized list of their work in Tasks on their mobile device. When they finish a task, they mark it complete. Some may even choose to upload and attach a photo to the task to show their work.
Contoso headquarters and intermediate managers can view reporting to see the assignment and completion status of tasks at each store and across stores. They can also drill down to a specific task to see the status within different stores. As the launch date gets closer, they can spot any abnormalities and check in with their teams as needed. This visibility allows Contoso to improve the efficiency of the rollout and provide a more consistent experience across their stores.
Set up your team targeting hierarchy
Microsoft Teams To Do Integration
To enable task publishing in your organization, you have to first set up your team targeting schema in a .CSV file. The schema defines how all the teams in your hierarchy are related to each other and the attributes used to filter and select teams. After you create the schema, upload it to Teams to apply it to your organization. Members of the publishing team, such as the Retail Communications Manager in the example scenario, can then filter teams by hierarchy, attributes, or a combination of both to select the relevant teams that should receive the task lists, and then publish the task lists to those teams.
For steps on how to set up your team targeting hierarchy, see Set up your team targeting hierarchy.
Power Automate and Graph API
Tasks supports Power Automate for To Do and Graph APIs for Planner. To learn more, see: