Top 20 Microsoft Teams Tips & Tricks

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you my favorite top 20 tips and tricks in microsoft teams if you want to jump around feel free to use the timestamps in the description otherwise let's jump on the pc and get started here i am in a microsoft teams meeting and the very first tip that we're going to cover is spotlight this is a brand new feature that just landed and with microsoft teams you can now spotlight yourself in a meeting what does that mean well you could pin your video so everyone sees your video as the spotlight let's see how this works now here we have a few people in the meeting first off let's go to the meeting controls and click on show participants i can see all the people in the meeting when i hover over an attendee or a participant's name you'll see an ellipses over on the right hand side when i click on this this shows me more options and here's the spotlight option i could spotlight myself if i click on someone else i can spotlight them so maybe depending on who's presenting i can put them in the spotlight for now i'm gonna put myself in the spotlight and here it is now i see some text telling me that i'm in the spotlight i have an icon down below indicating that i'm in the spotlight so what does this actually do well let's go over and check out what it looks like for nestor here's nestor's view and as you can see i'm in the spotlight and i've taken over the screen once i'm all done with the spotlight i could simply go up to my top bar and click on stop spotlighting tip number two three and four are all grouped together so we're gonna hit them all up at once now there's always a lot of functionality hidden under these ellipses up above in the participants view there's an ellipses right next to the x when we click on this there are three options and these are all relatively new first off i could set it so none of my attendees can unmute themselves let's say for example that maybe you're a teacher and one of your students just won't be quiet well you could set it so no one can unmute themselves and then you can continue your lecture without any interruption tip number three you can manage permissions for your meeting what does this mean well let's click in and see what we can do within manage permissions you now have full control over your meeting and the one that i want to highlight is you can decide who can present now if you're in a meeting once again maybe you're a teacher and one of your students wants to share their screen but maybe you're presenting a lecture and you don't want them to well you could set it so only you can present you could also set it so only specific people can present so this gives you a little bit more control over your meeting back in the ellipses and tip number four you can download an attendance list for everyone who attended your microsoft teams meeting you can see when they joined you could see when they left if they rejoined again so this is an effective way to track who's in your meeting now the one thing to keep in mind is if you want to track attendance you have to download this before the meeting ends once the meeting's over the attendance list ends with the meeting tip number five and this is one of my favorite ones let's imagine that you're having a brainstorming session and it'd be nice to have a whiteboard it turns out microsoft teams has a fully feature-rich whiteboard available to access the whiteboard let's go back up to the meeting controls up above and click on share content this opens up our sharing tray and on the far right hand side there's an option for microsoft whiteboard let's click on this this opens up whiteboard on the web and i have all these different controls to have a really rich dialogue and brainstorming session i could annotate my screen with a variety of colors i could insert text i could also insert post-it notes if i want an even more feature-rich whiteboard i could also open the app which you can download for free through the microsoft store if you want to see a more in-depth video on everything that you can do with whiteboard i did a video on it and i've included a link in the description tip number six and this is a fun one did you know that you can customize your video background okay i know that's been out for a while so that's not really a surprise but a little twist on that not only can you customize your background you can fully customize your background for example you can go into microsoft powerpoint and you could design your own background maybe you're a teacher maybe you work for a business you want to have some branding maybe you want your name to appear in the background you can create your own custom background if you do it with powerpoint you could create it you could go to save a copy and then you could save it as a gif a jpeg or a png and then we could bring that into microsoft teams back within microsoft teams i'm going to click on the ellipses up above which has all of the additional actions down here i could apply background effects now most of you have probably seen this before you could choose other images you could also blur your background but one of the nice things is you could add new and i'm now going to add the background that i created in microsoft powerpoint let's open this to see what it looks like now that i've added my image if i scroll all the way to the bottom i see my custom designed image i'm going to select this and i can click on preview to see what it looks like check that out this is my company now i know right now it might look like it's in reverse but that's for me as the participant i see my image as a mirror image but all of my attendees will see it the right way so even though it might look wrong here don't worry it's actually the right direction once you're ready to go click on apply and check that out i now have my image below with my own custom branding how cool is that tip number seven did you know that you can get a transcript of a microsoft teams meeting let's say you miss a meeting you can listen to the recording but that takes a little bit of time or alternatively you can simply read a transcript that's a much quicker way to consume content two get a transcript of a meeting first off we have to record the meeting to record a meeting go up to the more actions menu and click on start recording this now kicks off a recording now i need some good content in my transcript so let me maybe pitch the kevin stratford youtube channel if you haven't subscribed yet i highly recommend subscribing you get lots of videos like this one okay once we're done with our recording click on more actions again and click on stop recording let's confirm that we want to stop recording to access our transcript let's click into show conversation up on the top and over here i can see all of my different recordings if i click into the recording in the bottom right hand corner i can open it in microsoft stream let's open it in stream this opens up a browser window in microsoft stream and i see all of my different recordings from microsoft teams i could click on one of these videos and then up above on the right hand side i could see a transcript of everything that was said in the meeting i could search the transcript and i could even go in and i can edit the transcript to make sure that it's fully accurate tip number eight and this is a favorite of mine typically when you're in a microsoft teams meeting especially if you have more than just a few people you tend to leave your microphone on mute you don't want everyone else in the meeting hearing all of that background sound but people might call on you or maybe you have to answer a quick question or maybe chime in with your thoughts now you could go up and you could toggle the mute button so here i'm unmuted and then you could toggle mute again or you could use a shortcut key you can press ctrl shift and m m is in mute and if you press all of those that'll unmute your microphone and if you press it again it'll toggle your microphone again so now it's muted that's a quick shortcut key that you can very easily use to both mute and unmute your mic tip number nine did you know that when someone raises their hand in a microsoft teams meeting their name appears in the list in the order in which they raise their hand so let's say that you're a teacher and you have a whole bunch of people with their hand up you can start from the top of the list and move your way down let's look at this as an example now i'm in the top position because you always see yourself in the top position but then i see diego and i see nestor let's see what happens if nestor raises his hand nesser just raised his hand and he moved up in the list now diego's gonna raise his hand diego now has his hand up but you see that nestor maintains his top position in the list and diego is number two in the list after nestor so this way i could be fair when i respond to questions i simply go in the order in which people raise their hand tip number 10 and this is a pretty cool one you can turn on live captions in your microsoft teams meeting let's say maybe the audio is not that good or maybe it's a little hard to understand someone have the computer create captions for you to turn on captions let's go back up to the more actions menu and there's an option to turn on live captions i just turned it on and let's see how this works look at that my captions are appearing at the bottom of the screen and it's in a sense captioning every single thing i say if i want to turn it off the same way i turn it on i go to the more actions menu and click on turn off live captions i said bye to nestor and diego because my stomach's rumbling and i'm a little hungry so here i am back in the main team's interface and that brings me to tip number 11. you can very easily insert a quick pull into a conversation or within a channel how do we do that well first off let's click on new conversation and we have all of these icons that appear under the text field if we click on the ellipses search for the one that says microsoft forms i see it at the top of my list here if this is something that you might want to do often you can right click on it and pin it once you pin it it'll appear as one of these icons i'm going to click on forms to create a quick survey for this survey i want to ask both nestor and diego what they want to eat for lunch because i'm feeling hungry i'm going to type in my question what should we eat for lunch and i'll add a few options i've now added several options i could set it to multiple answers but i want everyone to be definitive and just choose one option next let's click on next i can now preview what my survey will look like that looks pretty good to me i'm gonna send this i've now inserted my survey into the general channel up above i see my poll anyone could come in here and answer it and right down below i can see the results now there's only one right answer for lunch if you've seen any of my videos before you know that the right answer is cookies so i'm going to select cookies for lunch and then submit my vote now that i've submitted my vote here you can see that a hundred percent of the votes are for cookies so i think that's where nestor diego and i will go for lunch today tip number 12 when you're in a team's channel there are lots of conversations going on and here i see that nestor asked me a question i want to remember to follow up with him but i'm in the middle of recording a tutorial right now so i don't want to take the time to respond right now how do i stay on top of this and how do i make sure i follow up on it well i simply hover over nester's question here and i can click on the ellipses menu now one of the themes of this video is there's a lot of valuable functionality under the ellipses menu within this list there's the option to save this message when i click on save this message i see this little prompt telling me that it's up here if i click up on my profile picture i see an option for saved let's click on this this shows me all of my different saved messages and here i could click through and see every item that i saved now maybe i follow up with nestor and i no longer need this on my saved list i could simply toggle right here to unsave this message and this removes it from my list this is a nice way to stay on top of action items on you from various channels tip number 13 not only can you save messages within a channel but you could also pin chat messages if you want to follow up on them later here for example let's say i have this conversation with diego it looks like he asked me a question but once again i'm filming a tutorial i don't have the time to answer i can hover over his message and once again more value under the ellipses i can pin this message to the top once i have time i'll go in and respond to this message and then i can click here again and i can unpin the message from my list so this also in a sense serves as a task list of the chats that i need to follow up on back within teams in the general channel of the new york city flagship location let's click into new conversation and this brings us to tip number 14. you can create rich text messages and also announcements announcements is something new how do we access that well we have all these icons on the bottom let's click on the one that says format now a neat thing that you could do here is you could type in a subject for your message especially when the channel starts getting busy with lots of different updates a subject can help your message stay out especially if you're going through past messages it'll help you identify the conversation thread now here you could add all sorts of formatting you could bold you could italicize you could change the color you could even insert code lots of different functions here there's also a new option now where you can post an announcement when we click on announcement you could type in a massive headline here you can add a picture background a color background and you could even choose can people reply or maybe only moderators can reply and you can even post in multiple channels let's say you have a big announcement and you want to make sure everyone sees it posted in multiple channels this is new functionality that just landed and there are lots of uses for it tip number 15 shortcut keys in microsoft teams earlier when we were in a meeting i showed you a very quick shortcut key how you could toggle your microphone on and off that's one of my favorite shortcut keys but there are many more shortcut keys but the one and probably the most important shortcut key to remember is the control key together with the period key when we press that that opens up keyboard shortcuts and you can look at all of the different shortcut keys available to you here's the one that we looked at earlier with toggling mute you could go through here and identify which shortcuts are the most important to you tip number 16 you can organize your teams and channels based on what's important to you now i don't have that many teams here but when i worked at microsoft i had a massive list of teams some of them were more relevant to me and some of them were less relevant luckily i can organize them based on what's important to me to organize them i could simply click on one of these teams and i could drag it around so i can move london to the top or maybe i move london back down to the bottom now the owner of the team probably wouldn't like this so much but i can even hide a team that i'm not interested in let's click on the ellipses and then within here click on hide this throws it under a hidden teams category and i could toggle that so i no longer see those teams i'm still part of those teams but they don't distract me from all of my other teams and all of the other activity that i care about if i want to bring this back i simply click on the ellipses again and then click on show now even within a team there might be many different channels and maybe one channel is more important to you than others you can right click on a channel and you could pin the channel to the top of your list giving you easy access back to that channel tip number 17 did you know that you can post in a microsoft team's channel via email you don't just have to come into microsoft teams and either reply or start a new conversation how do we do this well over on the left hand side on channels let's click on the ellipses and you can get an email address for a channel let's click on this this opens up a prompt that shows me the email address for this channel i can copy this and i can now send an email here let's test this out i've opened up an email message and i'm gonna send it to the channel and let's see how this works check that out the email has arrived and i see it showing up here within microsoft teams tip number 18 microsoft teams on its own is pretty feature rich but you can make it even more powerful with apps to access apps let's go over to the left hand rail and click on apps here we can see all sorts of apps that we could use with microsoft teams earlier we looked at how we could create a quick poll using microsoft forms but that's just one of these many different experiences that we can bring in to microsoft teams now i have two favorites that i want to highlight one of them is planner are soon to be called tasks when i click into this you can use this to manage all of your individual tasks and you can also use it to manage your group or your team tasks my next favorite app is shifts this is a super rich experience i did a separate video on this if you want to go deep but let's say that you want to manage an on-call schedule or maybe retail shifts you can use the shifts app in microsoft teams to manage all of that so you get tons and tons of power by bringing in these first and third party apps into microsoft teams tip number so far throughout this entire tutorial i've been using a light mode of microsoft teams you can very easily switch it into dark mode if you want to give your eyes a break and we're coming towards the end of the video so let's give our eyes a break to turn on dark mode let's go up to the profile picture on top and click into settings once settings opens under general you'll see right at the top you can set the theme let's turn on dark mode look at that that's so much nicer and easier on the eyes tip number 20 and this is the last tip of today if you're part of a large organization there might be lots of different activity happening and it could be difficult to stay on top of what's important to you luckily microsoft teams helps us with this on the left hand rail let's click on activity and this shows us our activity feed up over here in the right hand corner of that you can filter all of your activity you could type to filter or once again as we've seen throughout this entire tip video the ellipses have lots of good and rich functionality i can filter based on what type of activity i want to see one of my personal favorites is you can filter based on at mentions of you so you know what you need to follow up on if i click on at mentions once again i see this question that nestor asked me in one of the channels all right that wraps up our top 20 microsoft teams tips and tricks if you enjoyed this video and you learned some new tips and tricks please give this video a thumbs up if there are any other tips and tricks that i didn't cover today feel free to leave them in the comments down below to help others 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 leave a note down below and i'll add it to my list of videos to create alright 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: 1,230,649

Keywords: kevin stratvert, microsoft teams, teams, tips, tricks, how to use microsoft teams, teams microsoft, how to use teams, microsoft teams tutorial, ms teams, how to use ms teams, microsoft team, ms teams tutorial, tutorial, using microsoft teams, how to use microsoft teams app, how to use microsoft team, microsoft teams tutorial for beginners, how to use teams microsoft, how to use teams app, how does microsoft teams work, how to use teams in office 365, office 365, 365, help, how to

Id: w_NOLTAzDaQ

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020