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…

D is for; Dark Mode, Delegates, Devices and Do Not Disturb!

There are a few handy little features that begin with D in Teams, so this time I thought I’d wrap them all up in one post for you.

Dark Mode

If you spend a lot of time staring into your screen, you’ll know that sometimes your eyes can get a bit tired – especially if you’re working late into your evening.

The default Teams setting is very blue and white (and it’s going to get even whiter!) so sometimes you might want to give your eyes a little rest by setting it to Dark Mode instead.

Here’s how you do this:

Customize the Appearance in Microsoft Teams (free) – Microsoft Support

Go to the 3 dots in the top right corner of your Teams window to open up settings and more:

Choose settings

And then under General you should see the option to change to Dark mode:

You should find it changes straight away:

And now your eyes can get a nice rest.

Delegates

From the same settings menu, you can also manage your delegates. If you want to set up Teams so that people can make and receive calls on your behalf, scroll down under General and you should see the Delegation option:

From here you can add a delegate person from within your organisation to make and receive calls on your behalf. You can also toggle to see people who you act as a delegate for:  

Probably goes without saying but it’s usually useful to let people know when you’re setting them up as a delegate!

Devices

Ahh the wonderful world of devices – that’s a whole area of expertise on its own! If you are lucky, you might have more than one device that you can use for Teams calls and meetings.

In the same settings and more menu that we’ve been talking about, you can play around with your device settings, choosing which device Teams should pick for your microphone, speakers, and camera. There’s also an option to make a test call here so that you can hear what you sound like to other people:

You can also toggle a few things off and on for your video, like Green Screen, brightness and soft focus:

Do Not Disturb!

Sometimes, you just need to get your head down and plough through a task without any distractions, and Teams can be FULL of distractions. Chats popping up, gifs looping around, people @ mentioning you, and random unscheduled calls.

There is a way to escape this – and that is the Do Not Disturb status. A shortcut to setting your status to DND is to type /dnd in your command bar at the top of Teams (more on / commands when we get to S!):

This Microsoft page explains the user experience of each status User presence in Teams – Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn

For DND – you won’t receive banner notifications for chat messages, and all your calls will go to voicemail.

If you manage a team of people and are wary about using DND status in case someone needs to reach out to you about something very urgent – there is a way around this.

In the settings and more menu we’ve been looking at throughout this post, you can manage something called priority access under the Privacy option:

This will allow you to choose certain people from within your organisation who can break through your DND status if necessary:

Once you’ve set this up, the people that you specify will be able to reach you even if you have set your status to DND. It might be best to let them know that you’ve done this, and what constitutes ‘urgent’ – otherwise you might find that your DND isn’t respected!

Next week it’s E (which may possibly maybe include a shameless plug for Empowering.Cloud!)

Hope you’re enjoying the A-Z of Teams series. If you missed the earlier letters of the alphabet, you can find them here:

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/01/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-a-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/07/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/16/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-b-is-for/

https://lyndsay.blog/2023/03/22/lyndsays-a-z-of-microsoft-teams-c-is-for-part-1/

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 2) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

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

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for (part 4!!!) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

Happy Teamsing!