How to use Slack

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can both get and use slack now what is slack probably the best way to explain is to share a quick story about where slack came from many many years ago stuart butterfield was running a company to develop a game called glitch and as they were developing this game it turned out that all of the existing ways of communicating and collaborating were really insufficient so stewart and team went about developing a tool to help them with the development of their game now they ended up releasing the game and it didn't really resonate and it didn't go anywhere but the tool that they developed to help with the creation of the game ended up actually having legs and it became known as slack and now that's gone on to become a 16 billion dollar company so still what is slack well it's a messaging app that brings all of your communications into one place now that might sound very similar to what email does so what's the difference between email and slack well slack aims to improve upon many of the deficiencies that exist with email with email most of your communications are sorted by when they arrived in your inbox with slack on the other hand all of your communications are ordered by channel conversation or topic also with email all of your conversations are limited to who is initially part of that conversation so who's on the two line and who's on the cc line with slack on the other hand you can drop in on the conversations that interest you most and what's relevant to you now slack really popularized this form of communication there have been many other competitors who have also entered the space now for instance you have microsoft with teams you have cisco with webex teams you even have what was traditionally more of a consumer offering with discord moving more into the commercial and the productivity space so there are many different options out there now this video won't go into to all the differences between these different apps and which ones you should choose instead i'm going to simply give a high level overview of slack and today we're going to first off jump into how to get slack then i'm going to show you how you can use slack all right well why don't we jump on the pc and get started here i am on my pc and first off i want to show you how you can get slack to get slack open up your web browser and head to the website slack.com that'll drop you on the main slack home page to get started it's very easy and it's also free to get started all you need to do is either click on try for free or up here in the top right hand corner click on get started on the next page we have two different options we can create a new slack workspace this will be a blank canvas that no one is yet part of you could use this if you just want to experiment or maybe you're bringing slack to your organization and you want to invite other people to join your workspace on the other hand though let's say that you already have slack in your organization and you simply want to join an existing instance of slack you can sign in and then join an existing workspace now when we get started with slack here this is going to by default log us into the web slack is also available as a desktop app on both windows and mac and you could also get it as a mobile app whether you're using an iphone or an android phone i've now signed into slack and this is the main slack interface i want to take a moment to orient you to what you see here and what the different capabilities are within slack let's start out in the top left hand corner and up here i see my workspace name or your organization's name in my case it's called the kevin cookie company if i click on this i have the option to invite more people to join my workspace now the richness of slack comes when you're working together with others so if it's a new workspace you'll likely want to include more people to your workspace if it's an existing workspace you likely already have people collaborating here along with being able to invite people to your workspace you can also create a channel and within a channel this is where much of the communication and collaboration will occur so next why don't we jump in and see what we could do with channels over on the left hand side of my screen i see a bunch of channels so what is a channel well channels help organize conversations and topics now earlier i mentioned emails organized by date with slack conversations and topics are organized by channels so with the kevin cookie company we have a channel for the finance team we have a general channel which is where all sorts of conversations related to the kevin cookie company occur we also have the marketing team and they have all their ch conversations within the marketing channel so it's a way of organizing conversations now i run the kevin cookie company and if i want to jump in and say hey what's going on with the finance team or what types of things are they talking about i could jump into the finance channel to very quickly get caught up on all the conversations the same thing with the marketing channel now all of these channels you'll see that they have a pound sign in front of them or a hash mark what this indicates is that it's a public channel that means that anyone can go into one of these channels to see what conversations are occurring and you can contribute to those conversations now of course you don't always want all conversations to be public there might be some confidential conversations for instance maybe with the kevin cookie company we're looking at opening a new location in a city but we haven't announced it yet well we should probably have that conversation in our top secret channel you'll see over on the left hand side that there's a lock symbol and this indicates that it's a private channel now if you want to start a new channel it's very simple to do you could either click on add a channel down here or you could click on the plus icon next to channels and you can easily create both public and private channels you could either set it so everyone is part of the channel or you could define specific individuals who you want to have access to that channel you'll see on my list i have several different channels how do i stay on top of these different channels to know what's going on well luckily slack offers some tools to stay on top of various channels when i go up to finance for instance let's say i'm very interested in the finance conversations i can right click on this and i can star the channel when i start the channel you'll see that it elevates it to its own separate category not only can i start a channel if i right click on general i have a few additional options i could set notification settings for this specific channel so for instance i could be notified about any conversations occurring or maybe only when someone at mentions me and at mention is when someone is specifically calling me out for my attention let's say that there's a channel that doesn't interest me at all i can mute the channel i can even leave a channel if i don't want it appearing on my left hand side and then there are some additional options for instance you could rename a channel you could archive a channel and you could even delete a channel along with options of sharing the channel so you could get other people to contribute to it now slack isn't just limited to channels you can also have direct conversations or what slack refers to as direct messages so with direct messages i'll show an example here so here's megan down below i can click on megan and then i can have a conversation directly with megan i can also set up a direct message so it has multiple people in it so maybe i have a conversation with say two or three people next i want to show some of the messaging capabilities that are available within slack and for that i'm going to go up to our finance channel so here i am in the channel and over on the right hand side this is where we're going to have our conversations this is where we're going to chat this is where we're going to share information and this is also where we could share files so let's go and test this out first off i'm going to type in just a simple message and say hello everyone once i send my message one of the really neat things is when i hover over the message you'll see that it exposes some additional options for instance i can add a reaction so let's say one of my co-workers posts a message and i like the work they did i could insert a thumbs up along with that there's also this chat icon and when i click on this this allows me to reply to a thread now someone could come in and they could simply type in a message in response to my text but the trouble is especially if you have a lot of people who are part of a channel there can be multiple conversations going on by responding in a thread it'll keep conversations connected so you know that a response ties back to the original message as i hover over a few other controls i could share the message with others and i could go ahead and save the message when i save the message here you'll see in the top left hand corner that it's now added it to saved items so this is one way that i can get back to messages or in a sense i can use it as a to-do list to stay on top of things that i need to follow up on to follow up on a message i'm not just limited to saving the item if i click on the more actions menu at the end i see even more actions that i can take on a message and one of the interesting ones is i can set a reminder about this so yeah i could save the message and in a sense add it to a task list or i could get a reminder so here i could set one of the preset options or i could even set a custom reminder along with setting reminders you could even pin a message to the top of the channel so maybe in the finance team you want to provide some tools that everyone joining the finance team should know about you could pin that message to the top it's for important information that you want everyone to see and then lastly just some additional controls i could go back edit the message or maybe i made a mistake and i didn't want to send this message i can delete it now back in the main chat interface i want to show some of the other richness that you can take advantage of within chat now one of the great things is when you type a message here oftentimes you want to call out an individual so let's say that i want megan to follow up on a report i can at mention her i simply insert the at side and now you'll see that i can mention megan's name and then i could say megan what's the status on that report not only can i call out megan though i could also call out the entire channel so anyone who's part of this channel i can notify them and then here too whoever's currently in the channel i can notify them so let me notify megan i've now sent my message and i've at mentioned megan she will now get a notification that calls her attention to this message and she can then respond to me now not only can i insert an at mention slack also offers pretty rich commands if i enter a forward slash this shows me all types of commands that i can use in slack and these are things i could do through the user experience but by using the forward slash it makes it even easier and quicker to engage with slack and the nice thing here is when i enter a forward slash it shows me all the different types of commands that i could run now aside from entering commands in the text field you have all of your standard formatting tools down below whether you want to bold something italicize strikethrough one of the neat additions especially if you're a software developer is you can insert code and you can even insert code snippets within this area now over on the left hand side you have access to shortcuts let's take a moment to see what's in here with shortcuts you could simply create a reminder you could start a call or you could create a post a post is a more formal type of writing compared to a message that you would send in a channel back with the text field some of the other things we could do over on the right hand side maybe you don't want all these formatting tools well you could hide it and show it here's an option where you can at mention someone this brings up the same capability as if you just entered the ad symbol within the text field but it makes it a little bit more discoverable you could insert emojis into your chat and lastly and this is one of the really rich things that you can do in slack you can attach a file let's click on attach file when i click on attach file this opens up the option to add a file for my computer once again if i integrate slack with services like dropbox or onedrive or google drive i'll see additional places where i could add files from but i haven't done that yet so i'm just going to click on my computer this opens up the windows file picker and let me choose this song that's on my desktop and i'm going to share this with the channel it's attached the file now so let me also include a message i sent my message through and i said let me know what you think about this song now once again one of the benefits of using slack versus say using email is this file is accessible to everyone if we make edits to the file in this case it's music so we wouldn't but imagine it were say a document or a spreadsheet we could all work off of the file within slack and there's no need to email the file back and forth and not only that if we have any feedback or comments on the file once again if i hover over the message with the attachment i can click on reply in thread and all of our conversations around this file will all be connected so imagine you're working on a spreadsheet or a word document with your team you can keep all the conversation connected to that verse having your file in one place and then all the conversations in a separate place now we've looked at a lot of the richness around how you can have conversations in channels and how you can direct message and even attach files now once you start having a lot of content within slack being able to find content and get back to content becomes more challenging luckily we have the search field on the top that makes it super simple to get back to content i'm going to click on the search field and within the search field this searches across conversations channels files even content within files and not only that but it offers some super rich filters to help us get back to the content that we care about for instance here you see two of the filters where you can narrow it down to just a channel or a direct message or from a specific individual now i'm going to go and search for a recent search just marketing when i search for marketing you see this brings up the search dialog and here i could filter by messages i could filter by channels files and people and then within here i have additional filters that i can use to get to the piece of content that i care about in this case i was simply looking for the channel so i'm just going to click on the channel to get back to it search helps you get back to any type of content that exists in slack but let's say that you want to stay on top of content as soon as it's added or as soon as conversations are going on slack offers very rich notifications to take advantage of notifications let's click on the people profile picture in the top right hand corner and then go down to preferences within preferences we land within the notifications view and here you can customize all of your notifications for slack so by default here it's notifying me about all new messages but i could scope it more and have it so it only notifies me about direct messages to me or where i'm at mentioned or for specific keywords that i call out down below i could also set things like if i'm part of a thread i want to get a notification when someone responds to the thread here i could get set keywords that i get notified about so once again maybe we're talking about opening a new location and anytime someone mentions location i want to get a notification i can add that keyword here along with setting keywords some of the other things that are nice is let's say you don't want to have to respond to messages all the time you can set what the range of hours is for when you want notifications to come through while we're in preferences i want to show a few other neat things that you can set the next option is the sidebar the sidebar appears on the left hand side of slack you could set this so it shows all of your direct messages all of your ad mentions your saved items you can go through and configure this all you want i'm going to check on apps and we'll take a look at that in a moment along with the sidebar you could set your theme as well so maybe you want a dark theme you could set that here they have lots of different themes that you could choose from so you can customize the experience so it's your own so far we've been talking about functionality that's available natively with slack and it has a lot of rich functionality but really like i mentioned before much of the magic of slack comes from its ability to integrate with other apps let's go over to the left hand side and in the quick action list you'll see an option for apps or at least i just added one if you don't have apps on your list here you can click on more and then you can click on apps here if you want to add apps to the top level once again you can go to preferences and then add it so it appears by default on this list let's click on apps this opens up all the different apps that you can integrate with slack you could simply search for an app or even a category and you'll see all the different apps now slack has one of the most comprehensive integration stories chances are if you're using an app you can integrate it into slack down below i see some of the most popular integrations with slack and you could read what you can do when you integrate it with slack i want to give just a quick example so with the kevin cookie company we have a twitter account and occasionally people will at mention us or tweet about the kevin cookie company if i integrate twitter into slack anytime someone tweets about the kevin cookie company i can have that tweet appear within one of our channels so it truly starts to bring all of your work and all of your communications into one place within slack another great example is trello or asana if you want to say be able to create a quick task from the context of slack you can very easily do that for those apps slack isn't just limited to asynchronous communication you can also have real time and live communication and to do that i'm going to go down to direct messages and i've had this conversation with megan let's say instead of just chatting back and forth i instead want to have a voice or a video call up in the top right hand corner i can call megan using slack let's click on this this opens up a call with megan and similar to most other video conferencing products here i could turn my microphone on or off i could turn my video on or off so here i am on the video i could also screen share with the free plan though you can't screen share you have to go with a paid plan to be able to do this and then you could also send reactions in the call and lastly i can also hang up in this case i'm going to hang up now back in the main interface this covers most of the standard functionality with this video hopefully this shows you how you can get started with slack one thing i want to mention again is this is all looking at the web interface of slack you can also get the desktop client it has lots of similar functionality but you do have a little bit more flexibility in terms of how you get your notifications and lastly you can also get slack on your mobile device and the great thing about using slack on whether it's a desktop app or your mobile device any of your conversations any of the files being shared any of the direct messages it'll appear across all of your different apps regardless of where you happen to be so if you're on your mobile phone it'll be in sync with what you see on your desktop all right well that was a quick look at how you can get and also use slack if you found this video helpful and you now know how to use slack please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future maybe additional functionality say within slack or even any other topic leave a comment down below that's how i build my list of videos to create all right well that's all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye you

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 69,712

Rating: 4.963058 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, slack, teams, webex, webex teams, microsoft teams, discord, tutorial, guide, help, how to, steward butterfield, glitch, communication, email, notifications, notification, channels, channel, chat, video conferencing, video conference, conference, video, talk, slack.com, workspace, mobile, desktop, web, search, direct messaging, direct messages, reminder, save, pin, edi, commands, @ mention, side bar, files, file, sharing, share, attach, collaborate, filters, filter, apps, app integration

Id: RRxQQxiM7AA

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020