Microsoft Teams Tips And Tricks To Make Your Team Collaborations More Productive
More business professionals and teams across a variety of disciplines are turning to Microsoft Teams for better collaboration. Many are already transitioning to MS Teams from Skype for Business, realizing the immense potential of Teams for better team collaborations. What most of the users haven’t realized yet, however, is that a few quick tips and tricks can make this online collaboration tool even more productive.
If you are already on your way to explore Microsoft Teams, here are a few Microsoft Teams tips that will help you make your experience more productive.
Important Keyboard Shortcuts
Like many other software, MS Teams offers some keyboard shortcuts for better accessibility allowing participants to perform routine tasks quickly. Here are some important keyboard shortcuts that every user should have on their fingertips.
- Ctrl+N (starts a new chat)
- Ctrl+H (go to help)
- Ctrl+, (opens settings)
- Ctrl+3 (opens Teams)
There are a lot of other useful shortcuts that will improve your efficiency. Just press “Ctrl+.” and a list of all available shortcuts will appear on your screen.
Quick Tips For Messages
MS Teams offers some useful features to make the most of Messages, allowing teams to collaborate better. You can perform different actions by clicking the three dots icon on the right of every message. Here’s how you can exploit the Messages feature for the better.
- Bookmarking messages: You can clicking the option “save this message” to bookmark a message in Teams. The message can later be found by typing “/saved” in the search bar.
- Marking messages as unread: Click the option “mark as unread” to keep messages ‘unread’ to address later. These messages can be found using “/unread” command later.
- Immersive reader mode: With this option, you can get Teams to read the message out loud for you.
- Inline Message Translation: It’s a must-have for international teams. To enable inline translations:
- Login to the MS Teams admin center
- Choose Messaging Policies in the navigation bar on the left
- Edit an existing policy or create a new one
- Turn “Allow Users to Translate Messages” switch to on.
(This setting takes a couple of hours to be implemented.)
Filtering and Sending messages with @mention: Use @mention to shoot quick messages to your peers easily without having to close the tab you’re currently using. Just type “@” in the search bar and find the name of your peer you want to send message to. This feature also helps you to filter your recent activity so that you can prioritize stuff. To do that, simply click on filter button in your activity feed and select “@mentions”.
Blurring Your Background
When working from home, there is always something in your background that you don’t want your peers to see. If you have to go on camera during a meeting, and you haven’t cleaned your room yet or want to remove any distractions in the background, you can blur the background. To do this:
- Click the icon with three dots in the menu that appears at the bottom of a video call
- Select “show background effects”
- Turn the “Blur” on.
Grouping Users Together
Sometimes, when you’re working in a team, you need to divide into subgroups based on roles, assigned tasks or location. This makes things simple to start a new chat with a particular group or use @mention to find their recent activity. This is called Tagging in MS Teams and you can easily manage tags from Microsoft Teams options.
Microsoft Teams, without any doubt, is highly impactful in today’s world of online meetings. By using it properly, you can make your teams more productive and enjoy better results. Start implementing these tips today!