Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 3)

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 3)

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 3) Calendar!

I’m aware that I’m really milking letter C; we’ve already looked at Chat and Channels – let’s look at Calendar today!

The Teams calendar is a pretty clever little thing in my opinion. Everything you schedule in Teams, Outlook and Exchange will show up in here, so if you set up a meeting using Outlook, it will show in your Teams calendar automagically, without you having to duplicate or remember anything.

The same works the other way around, so if you set up a meeting in your Teams calendar, it will show up in Outlook… magic!

Here are some other handy things you can do with your Teams calendar:

You can change how much of your week that you see

I can change which days I see on my calendar in the top right of my calendar view:

I can either choose to see a day, a work week or a full week. This is handy if your working week is not the typical Mon-Fri, as your calendar view won’t get cluttered up with days that you don’t need to see.

You’ll need to set your work week in Outlook first to be able to see your work week view in Teams. You can find out how to do that on Microsoft’s support pages here: Set the first day of the calendar week and change calendar work days – Microsoft Support

You can schedule a new meeting

You can use your Teams calendar to schedule meetings by clicking on the new meeting button in the top right:

Depending on your licence, you can set up a new meeting, a live event or a webinar:

If you schedule a meeting, you get all the same meeting settings options that you’re probably familiar with if you already use Outlook to schedule meetings, including the option to make the meeting recurring.

You can also add the meeting to a particular channel in teams, which can be handy for things like team meetings.

In the top tab you can use the scheduling assistant to make sure that the people you’ve invited to the meeting are available to attend at the time of the meeting.

You can also click on any time slot in your calendar to schedule a meeting.

You can instantly launch a new meeting

Pressing the ‘Meet now’ button will give you the option to instantly start a new meeting:

You can share the meeting link with others to quickly bring them into the meeting, or just start the meeting. This can be useful if you want to record yourself doing a screen share for example.

Once you join the meeting, you get the option again to add people quickly into it by copying the meeting link, which you can send to users external to your organisation, or by adding participants within your organisation directly.