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

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

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…

R is for Replies, Read Receipts, and Reactions

A collection of quickfire Rs today, and they’re all chat-related. Let’s get to it!

Suggested Replies

If you enable the suggested replies setting in Microsoft Teams, sometimes when you receive chat messages, Teams will give you the option of a couple of different quick responses you click on and immediately send, without having to type them out:

This is helpful if you’re in a rush / on the go on mobile.

The suggested replies aren’t always entirely appropriate, so use with caution! (Makes me chuckle often though.)

To find out how you can turn on suggested replies if you don’t already have them (or to turn them off if they’re annoying you!) – check out the Microsoft Support page here: Use suggested replies to respond to messages without typing in Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Support

Reply with a quote

If there’s a chat going on that is quite busy, or has lots of ideas in, you may want to make it clear that you’re responding to a particular message.

Here’s how you can do this – find the message you want to respond to, hover over it and click on the 3 dots. Then choose Reply:

You’ll then be able to quote the original message in your reply, making it easier to keep track of what you’re talking about:

Here’s how it looks when you send it:

This one helps save quite a lot of confusion!

Read Receipts

Did you know that Teams now includes read receipts? This means that you can see whether people have read your chat messages or not. (A bit like those ticks in WhatsApp)

Next to the chat message, you’ll either see a tiny tick:

Which means that the message has been sent but not seen by the recipient yet.

Or you’ll see a little eye icon:

Which means your message has been seen. If you’re in a group chat and you hover over the eye, it will also tell you whether or not everyone in the group chat has seen the message:

This is helpful to figure out whether people need chasing for a response, or if they don’t even know they have anything to respond to yet.

Random side note; I find that the longer I look at the little eye icon, the weirder it makes me feel. Maybe that’s just me…

If you find the concept of read receipts a bit stalker-esque, you can turn them off for yourself so that other people can’t see whether you’ve read messages or not. Find out how to do this here: Use read receipts for messages in Microsoft Teams – Microsoft Support

Reactions

You probably know this by now but in case you don’t, you can also react to chat messages by hovering over them:

You can either choose from one of the default reactions that Teams offers you, or press the face and + icon to choose from alllll the other emojis:

Sometimes I think that for the sake of injecting some humour into a work day, taking a few more seconds to scroll through and find a great emoji is so worth it.

Who wouldn’t want to see a pretzel as a reaction to their message?!