5 tips for more efficient work with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is an inno­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­form and cen­tral hub for vir­tual team­work. Teams sup­ports a vari­ety of fea­tures includ­ing chat, group chat, online meet­ing, video con­fer­ence, web con­fer­ence and phone call. The inte­gra­tion of var­i­ous end devices and inte­grated Microsoft 365 appli­ca­tions such as Word, Excel, Pow­er­Point and Share­Point enable location-​independent, col­lab­o­ra­tive work on files.

Microsoft Teams thus cre­ates excel­lent dig­i­tal frame­work con­di­tions for accel­er­ated trans­par­ent project work. With a few tips and tricks, they can make your work even clearer and more effi­cient to achieve max­i­mum suc­cess for you and your com­pany!

Save Mes­sage & Chat

Want to find an impor­tant mes­sage or chat more eas­ily in the future? Save indi­vid­ual mes­sages or com­plete con­ver­sa­tions eas­ily!

Move the cur­sor to the mes­sage or file you want to save until emo­jis and three dots appear. Click­ing on the three dots will open “More options” and you will see the “Save this mes­sage” but­ton.

To save indi­vid­ual and group chats, move the cur­sor over the desired chat in the list of all your chats, click on the three dots that appear here as well, and then click on the “Pin” func­tion. To view your saved mes­sages clearly, click on your pro­file pic­ture and then select “Saved”.

Alter­na­tively, you can type the com­mand “/​saved” into the search bar or the com­mand field at the top of the screen.

Pri­or­i­tiz­ing mes­sages

Want to make sure your col­leagues don’t miss your mes­sage? Mark it as impor­tant or urgent!

To do this, click on the “Set deliv­ery option” func­tion (sym­bol­ized by an excla­ma­tion mark) in the chat win­dow under the input field and then select “Impor­tant” or “Urgent”. Of course, you can also undo or change your selected pri­or­i­ti­za­tion at any time. To do this, all you have to do is select one of the other two options.

Whether you choose to pri­or­i­tize before, dur­ing, or after com­pos­ing your mes­sage is up to you. How­ever, you can­not pri­or­i­tize the mes­sage after you have sent it. Pri­or­i­tiz­ing “Impor­tant” will only mark the mes­sage as impor­tant. Pri­or­i­tiz­ing “Urgent” will even notify the recip­i­ent every two min­utes for the next 20 min­utes – or until the mes­sage is read.

Chat and work simul­ta­ne­ously

Chat­ting with a col­league but want to be active in teams else­where at the same time? Pop out chats (chats as their own win­dows)!

You have five options for this. In the list of all chats, you can hover over the exist­ing chat and click on the pop-​out icon. Alter­na­tively, right-​click on the desired chat to open the con­text menu. Select the “Pop-​out chat” func­tion here.

You also have the option of click­ing “Pop-​Out Chat” in the upper right cor­ner of the chat win­dow or double-​clicking the person’s pro­file pic­ture. Last but not least, you can also type “/​pop” in the com­mand line at the top of the screen and select the desired chat. All these actions have the same effect: you chat in a sep­a­rate win­dow!

Record a meet­ing

Need to see all your meet­ings in the future? Record your meet­ings!

First, you need to join an ongo­ing meet­ing or start a new one. Even­tu­ally, you can record any audio, video, and screen shar­ing. Inform your meet­ing par­tic­i­pants about the record­ing. To start record­ing, go to the meet­ing con­trols, click the three dots (“More options”), and then click Start Record­ing. To stop record­ing, repeat this process, select­ing the “Stop Record­ing” func­tion.

After you stop the record­ing, it will be auto­mat­i­cally processed and saved to Microsoft Stream (or Share­Point or OneDrive, if applic­a­ble). The record­ing can then be played back, down­loaded and shared here. The par­tic­i­pant who started the record­ing will receive an email noti­fi­ca­tion when the record­ing has fin­ished pro­cess­ing and can be accessed. In addi­tion, the record­ing is also dis­played in the meet­ing chat – or in the chan­nel con­ver­sa­tion when you meet in a chan­nel.

Learn short­cuts

Do you want to work faster and more effec­tively with teams? Learn short­cuts!

To see a list of all short­cuts, press [CTRL] + [.]. Pick out a few short­cuts that seem use­ful to you. By adopt­ing the short­cuts into your daily work rou­tine, you will not only save your­self some mouse clicks, but also a lot of time.

Do you need Microsoft Teams? Take a look at our IT con­fig­u­ra­tor and find your ideal Microsoft 365 pack­age! You are also wel­come to call or email us – we will find a suit­able solu­tion for you!