The global mass migration to hybrid work caused by the pandemic has boosted the popularity of Microsoft Teams, making it the primary collaboration platform for many organizations and their employees.
Today, Teams has nearly 300 million active users worldwide, who use the software to participate in group meetings, make and receive video and voice calls, collaborate in real-time with apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, send instant messages from a variety of different devices, and more.
Even though Teams is now one of the most used digital business tools, many of its helpful features remain hidden or overlooked by a large chunk of its users. Taking the time to learn how they work is a must for those who enjoy using the tools they work with to their full potential.
These Are Our Favorite Hidden and Overlooked Microsoft Teams Features:
1. Keyboard Shortcuts
The desktop and web versions of Teams support keyboard shortcuts, allowing its users to perform many common actions more efficiently.
Tip: On Mac, use the Command key instead of Ctrl and the Left Option key instead of Left Alt.
You can find a complete list of all shortcuts supported on Microsoft’s website, or you can press Ctrl+Period (.) in Teams.
2. Written Commands
In addition to keyboard shortcuts, Teams also supports written commands. Such commands can be entered in the command box at the top of Teams, and they always start with the slash (/).
To see all available commands, you can:
- Type / in the command box
- Press Alt+K (Windows) or Option+K (Mac)
Here are three commands we find especially useful:
Command
/away
/busy
/unread
Description
Set your status to away
Set your status to busy
See all your unread activity
3. Send an Email to a Channel
In organizations where Teams is used for internal communication between employees and email is used for external communication with customers and business partners, a lot of time can be wasted on copy & pasting information from emails to Teams.
The good news is that emails can be forwarded to a channel in Teams directly using its email address. To obtain it:
1. Right-click the channel you want to email.
2. Click the Get link to channel option.
3. Click Copy.
You can then paste the copied email address into the To field in your favorite email client.
Note: The Teams administrator needs to enable this feature first for the Get email address option to be available.
4. Save Important Messages
When all employees use Teams to share their ideas, discuss project details, and engage in lighthearted banter, important information can quickly get buried and become difficult to find again.
To prevent this from happening, it’s a good idea to save important messages for later by following these steps:
- Place the cursor over the message you want to save.
- Click the three horizontal dots.
- Select the Save this message
To see all saved messages, click your profile picture in the top-right corner and choose the Saved option.
5. Pin Favorite Channels
Most Teams users spend much of their time in just a handful of channels, but the list of channels they’re included in is usually much, much longer. This can make it difficult to find the right channel and result in a lot of wasted time in the long term.
Fortunately, you can pin your favorite channels to make them easily accessible:
- Place the cursor over the channel you want to pin.
- Click the three horizontal dots.
- Select the Pin
The pinned channel will be visible in the Pinned section at the top of your channel list.
6. Create Announcements
Do you have an important announcement to share and want everyone to notice it? Then you can create a channel announcement with a heading, image, and other visual elements to make it stand out:
- Open the channel where you want to share the announcement.
- Click the Format
- Instead of New conversation, select Announcement as your post type.
- Customize the announcement.
- Click the Send icon to send it.
Tip: To send a single announcement in multiple channels at once, you can click the Post in multiple channels option when customizing your announcement and add the desired channels.
7. Add Loop Components
Microsoft has never been particularly good when it comes to naming its products and their features, and the so-called Loop components are just another example of this.
Despite their confusing name, Loop components are a fantastic way to boost collaboration and engagement in everyday one-to-one and group chats because they can be used to include tables, paragraphs, checklists, and other elements that participants can edit inline.
To add a Loop component:
- Open the chat where you want to add it.
- Click the Loop components
- Select the desired component.
- (Optional) Enter content into the component.
- Click the Send icon to send it.
Unfortunately, Loop components are not available in channels—at least not yet! A request for adding the Loop components in channels is currently active in Microsoft’s feedback portal and ganging a lot of tracking.
8. Record Video Clips
Recently, Teams gained the ability to record short video replies (up to one minute) directly in one-to-one chats. The feature is useful in situations when asynchronous communication is preferred, such as when communicating with someone who is located several times zones away.
To record a video clip:
- Open a one-to-one chat.
- Click the small video camera icon next to the send button.
- Press the Record button in the pop-up window.
- Click the Review button to review the recorded footage.
- Click Send to send the recording.
9. Switch Devices During Meetings
Have you ever joined a Teams meeting on a computer, only for the meeting to drag on for far too long, preventing you from being where you needed to be? Teams has just the right feature for such situations: the ability to transfer a meeting from one device to another.
This is how it works:
- While in a meeting, open Teams on the device to which you want to transfer it.
- If you want to transfer the meeting to a mobile device, tap Join with room at the bottom of your screen or Join at the top of your screen.
3. If you want to transfer the meeting to a computer, click Join and select the Transfer to this device option.
Teams also lets you add a second device while keeping your other device in the meeting. This can be useful if, for example, you have some content on the other device that you want to share.
10. Live Captions
Unknown to many, Teams is smart enough to automatically create live captions for meetings in real-time, complete with speaker attribution to make it clear what is being said and by whom.
To turn live captions on:
- Join a meeting.
- Select More options in the meeting controls toolbar.
- Click the Turn on live captions
Live captions nicely complement the live transcription feature, which can be turned on to create a referenceable and downloadable transcription of an entire meeting.
Microsoft Teams Features: Summary
These are our favorite hidden and overlooked Microsoft Teams features that can improve the experience of any user of the popular collaboration platform. We hope that you’ve found at least one feature that piqued your interest. Microsoft is constantly working on new features and improvements for Teams, and we already look forward to what its developers will come up with next.