There’s SO MUCH going on in Microsoft Teams as a product, how do you even start to talk about it?! In this blog series I’m going to attempt to work my way through the letters of the alphabet, talking about as many features as I can think of in turn.

If you’re new to Teams, hopefully this helps you find your way around. If you’re not new to Teams, maybe you’ll still get some new ideas. Here we go…

C is for… (part 1) Chat

Well, I’m spoilt for choice here because there are lots of things in Teams that begin with C!

Let’s start with Chat.

Pretty much everyone who uses Teams must be familiar with Chat by now. Chat is a space where you can send messages back and forth with one person, or a group of people.

It’s Asynchronous, which means you can send messages any time and the history persists. That can be really useful but also tricky to navigate sometimes!

Sometimes I think the term ‘Chat’ doesn’t actually do justice to all the things that you can do in the Chat space in Teams. Let’s dig in a bit further…

You can share files in chat

If you want to collaborate on a document with someone (or a group) you can literally drag the document into the chat, and then everyone can open it and edit it at the same time! Great for not having version 6.4_Final_final_reallyfinal_LAedits of files flying back and forth over email.

If you need to find them again, they’ll be in the ‘files’ tab at the top of the chat window.

You can send a video message in chat

Use the little video button next to your send button to record a short (1 minute) video of yourself in chat. This can be useful if you’ve got something that’s easier to explain with your voice rather than typing, or to do a bit of show and tell (like ‘look at the cool hat I just bought’).  

You can turn chat messages into To-do tasks

This is a GREAT feature that I use all the time. I use Microsoft To-do for some of my task lists, and previously if someone has sent me a chat message that contained a task, I would copy and paste the text into a new item on my To-do list. BUT – if you hover over the chat message, you’ll see some options:

• You can add an emoji reaction to the message (Fun!)
• By clicking on the 3 dots you get a lot more options, one of which is to create a task in To-do with the wording of that message -genius! (The first time you use it, this option might be hiding under ‘more actions’)

With a couple of clicks you can add the chat message straight into your To-do list without having to copy and paste. The best part about this is that when you come to look at the item on your To-do list it has a direct link back to the chat message in Teams! So – if you come to the item on your To-do list and need a reminder of the context of the conversation, you don’t have to go manually searching around for it. I use this every day now and it has saved me loads of time. It does mean you have to get into using To-do as well though. No good escalating Teams messages into a To-do item unless you’re actually going to check the To-do list!  

You can reply to specific messages in chat

One of the tricky things about chat being asynchronous is that sometimes a few different conversations can be ongoing in parallel, and it’s easy for wires to get crossed. To avoid this and make it clear that you are responding to a particular message, you can hover over it, click on the 3 dots and choose ‘reply’. This will give everyone a view of the exact message that you are responding to.

You can schedule a message to send later

You need to remember to send Brian a message on Monday morning, but it’s midnight on Thursday and you don’t want to bother him with it until then. By right clicking on the send button, you can schedule that message to send on Monday morning, which means the pressure is off you remembering to send the message at the right time, and Brian won’t be disturbed by your out of hours epiphanies. Everyone’s a winner.

You can screen share via chat

Not every screen share needs to be done via video call! Ever noticed this button at the top of your chat window? That will let you share your screen with whoever you’re chatting with. Useful for ‘here’s an error I’m seeing, can you help?’ type things.

You can rename a group chat

If you’ve got a group chat going for a particular purpose, like after-work football (or ‘soccer’!), rather than leaving the group chat title as a list of names (which can be hard to find when you’re scanning down your list of chats) you can use the pencil icon to rename the group chat to ‘After work football’. Simple!

You can pop the chat out to a new window

This button at the top of the chat screen pops out the chat so that you can have it in a new window. This can be handy if you’ve got an ongoing chat while you’re working inside of other Teams channels and documents, so you don’t have to keep switching around your view all the time.

You can mark a chat unread

Another one of the handy options in the 3 dots menu if you hover over a chat message, mark unread does exactly what it says on the tin. So if you’re the kind of person who needs to see an unread notification to be reminded of an action, Teams has got you covered.

You can chat with yourself

You can send yourself chat messages, which sounds really strange but actually comes in handy for sometimes weird reasons.

I personally love that Teams also includes ‘(You)’ after your name, just in case you get confused…

You can pin a chat to the top of the message window

If you pin a chat message, everyone who is in the chat space will always see it at the top. This could be useful for signposting people to useful resources or reminding them of things like ‘please be inclusive in this group chat’ – although you’d hope that would go without saying…

You can add other apps into chat

Just like Channels, you can make Chat work even harder by adding other apps as tabs at the top. Click on the plus button beside the name of your chat, and choose from all sorts of third party or Microsoft apps to use right inside the chat.

SO MANY FEATURES just in Chat alone! Did you know it could work so hard to help you get things done?! You can find more info from the Microsoft Support pages on Chat here.

What’s your favourite chat feature?

Stay tuned for next week when C (part 2) is for Channels.

If you missed the earlier letters of the alphabet, you can find them here:

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – A is for…

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – B is for…

Happy Teamsing!