Today let's talk about 10 different ways you can improve your productivity when you're using Microsoft Teams. If you have tips of your own, please share them in the comments below, let's jump in. (country music) Tip number one, use shortcuts for faster navigation. To quickly search for something, use the shortcut key Control+E. This takes you directly to the search bar, and then you can type in
your phrase or your word and press Enter and it searches all your messages. You can restrict a type
to just chat or channel, and if you have more filters
you want to add to this, go to more filters. If it's a file you're looking for, switch your view to Files. Now, if instead you're
looking for something in a specific channel, use the shortcut key Control+F, this restricts your view
to that channel only, then type in what you're
looking for and press Enter and you get your results on the side here. Don't forget, you can also use commands
in the search bar. So let's go back with Control+E, press Escape to reset this, slash and then either select a command by moving with the arrow keys or just continue typing. In this case, let's say I
want to switch my status to do not disturb, so I'm going to go down
to dnd, press Enter and my status is updated. If you quickly want to jump
to another team or channel, use the shortcut key Control+G. This is going to bring
up the complete list, just select where you
want to go to, press Enter and you jump to that channel. To open a new chat window use Control+N. To quickly navigate to the different tabs you see on the side here, use Control+1, this takes you to the activity tab, Control+2 takes you to chat, Control+3 to teams and your channels, Control+4 to your calendar, Control+5 to calls and Control+6 to files. If you're in a meeting, you can use the shortcut key Control+Shift+M to mute and unmute and Control+Shift+O to activate and deactivate your video. Tip number two, drag and drop Outlook attachments. You don't need to download an
attachment to your computer and then upload it into teams, you can just drag and drop it in a conversation or your chat. Here I'm in a channel, I'm going to click on New conversation and I'd like to upload a
file that I have in my email. I just have to bring up the email, select the file, drag it and drop it in here. Tip number three, share to Outlook. If you'd like to share
a message as and email, you don't have to copy
and paste it your Outlook. Just go to more options
by clicking on the dots and select Share to Outlook. This is going to open up Outlook for you and it's going to put the
message with any links in there directly in the body of your message. You just have to type in
the missing information, add anything extra you
want to this message and then click on send. Tip number four, use power Automate. You can use Power Automate directly from Teams to create automations
between your applications. So in this case, we're going to add an automation that allows us to quickly
create a card in Planner from any message that we select here. First, let's add the Power Automate tab, go to more apps and
search for Power Automate. Let's add this. This is going to take us
to the power automate page and it's going to show us all the flows that we
currently have running. So this is the same view that you see if you go to Office 365 homepage and you log in from the browser. One difference is that
our view is restricted to Microsoft Teams flows, but we can change this and take
a look at all flows as well. To create a new flow, select New flow. This is going to take
us to the Create tab. Here we can either create
a flow from scratch or we can search for a template. Because my template involves Planner, I'm just going to type it in, press Enter, and I can see there is a template for creating a task from a message, that's the one I want, so let's select it. Next, I have to give this flow a name. I'll call mine Add task to project. Now, this flow involves
Teams and Planners, we need to be authenticated. In this case, I have done that. So let's go with Continue. Next, I get to select
the Planner group ID. The Planner I want to use in
this automation is Finance and the planner ID is the
Finance System Update. Now, let's go with Create flow. This is going to set up
the whole template for us. It tells me your flow is already created, and let's click on done. When I go back to home, I should see it here. Now, all of this is set up for me, but if I want to edit it or to see what type of actions
and triggers are involved, I'm just going to select
it and then go to edit. Here I can see the trigger, it involves an Adaptive Card. This gives me the ability
to add information for each task that I'm creating. So this is kind of like a dialog
box that's going to pop up, it's going to allow me to
add a title and a due date, and I can update this as I need. The next is the action
of creating the task. I have the group ID and the plan ID here, the title is going to be taken
directly from the dialog box, so from that adaptive card. If I want to add this message or this task
to a specific bucket, I can select the bucket from here, and in addition to this I have other options. Then you can add more
actions that captures additional information for your task. In this case, I'm just going
to go with the defaults here, but one thing I'm going to do
is to remove this last step. This is going to add a message to chat informing me that the action was done. So let's just go to the more options here and delete the last
step and saved the flow. Everything is set up for us, so let's go ahead and test this. I'm going to go to Teams, let's pick any message here. Under More actions, I now see, Add task to project. When I select this, I should get a card here, I can add a title, select my due date and submit. Now, this task is created in Planner. If I bring up Planner here, this is finance system update, I'm going to refresh this and I see a new bucket part here with the task I just added. Power Automate is a very powerful tool. If you want to get started, I have a more detailed video on this, link to it is going to
be in the description. Tip number five, use tags to group people in a team. Let's say you want to
send out a new message and you want to notify the IT
people who are within this team. You don't have to add mention
each single IT person, you can create a tag that
groups the IT people together. This way, you can add mention the tag name to notify all the IT people. To use tags. go to the team you want to add to tags to and go to More options and then Manage tags. Now, you can only do this
if you're a team owner, you can't do it if you're a member, you have to notify the
owner to do this for you. Now, let's create a tag. Tag name is IT squad, and then we can add the people and then Create. I have it squads set up here. Now, when I want to send a message and directly notify the IT squad, I just have to add mention the tag name. Tip number six, get all your to-dos and
projects in one place. Add Excel plus Views Planner and recently have started
to use Microsoft To-do. To be able to see all my tasks from these two separate apps in one place, I can go to more options here and add Tasks by Planner and To-do. And if you don't see it on this list, just type in Planner
and it's going to pop up then select it. Now on top, you're going to see your tasks from To-do, you can add a new task directly from here so you don't have to go to the To-do app 'cause everything is synced and you also get to see all
your shares plans from Planner directly in here as well. This shows us the list view, but we can easily switch to board view and update the cards as we need to. So this saves you from
going to separate apps to manage your tasks. To make this new tap stick, just right mouse click and pin it. Tip number seven, pop hot apps and chat. When you're in a different
view in Microsoft Teams, like for example here, I'm in Tasks by Planner and To-do and I'm working on this board here. When I get a message pop
up here and I click on it, it takes me directly to that chat, so it takes me out of this view. If you want to keep a separate
instance of your view, just pop out the app, right mouse click on the app and select Pop-out app. This will open a separate window for you so you can work in this view
without being interrupted. In addition to popping out apps, you can also pop up chat. So here I'm in a private chat, I'm going to pop this out because let's say we want
to work together on a file and we're going to have
a lot of back and forth, I'm going to pop out the chat. This way, I can put it to the side where actually I can
just snap it to the side and have my file on this side. So I can easily type in the chat and work on the file at the same time. Tip number eight, update your settings to
improve your concentration. If you have messages constantly
popping up on the site here, it's very distracting and it's difficult to get any work done. What you can do is update
your availability status here. Change it to Do not disturb. This by default suppresses messages from popping up on the side here. What you can also do is set
up a duration for your status. To go to duration under status, you can change this to do not disturb and set a duration for this status. You can set it to one hour
or 30 minutes and so on or you can select a custom
duration and click on done. If you want to change your
status back before it's due, just go back and either reset it or change it right here. Another option you have is to
suppress the message preview. Go to your profile, Settings, under Notifications, turn off, Show message preview. This way, when you get a new message, you can see from who it was but you can't see the
content of the message, you have to click on it
or go to chat directly to be able to see it. Number nine, use polls in Teams. To quickly add a poll
to your conversation, select new conversation, go to the additional options here and click on Forms. Here you get to type in your question, add a different options. I'm going to add one more. You can activate multiple
answers if you want. You also get to decide if you want to share the
results automatically after voting so everyone can see or keep the responses anonymous. I'm just going to leave it
as is here and click on Save. That's the preview, it looks good, let's send this. This way people can see the
results are not anonymous and they're going to be shared here. They can vote, so I'm going to submit my vote here and we get to see the
responses on the bottom here. And finally, tip number 10, add your apps to Teams. If you and your team
find yourself using apps outside of Teams, try adding them as a separate
tab in your team channel. So for example, this channel here has files which is there
by default, there is Wiki and it has two more apps that were added. It's the Whiteboard app
and the Planner app. This saves us from logging
into different applications. we have everything
available directly in Teams. To add a new tab, just go to the plus here
and search for your app. Now, this is not just Microsoft apps, you have a lot of different
third party apps here. So just search for it and add it here. And also, if you have some files that you need to add as a separate tab, you can do that. Just go to the file that you want, go to More options here and make it a tab. This makes it available for everyone in the team. So these were my 10
teams productivity tips. If you have a favorite tip, please share it in the comments. In case you enjoyed this video, please hit that thumbs up and if you find yourself
learning something new here and improving your skills, consider subscribing. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. (country music)
