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

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – S 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…

S is for Search, Saved messages, Settings, and Sharing

Stroll with me through the soothing stream of Ss in Microsoft Teams, it’ll be superb.

Search

There’s a great big search bar at the top of Teams, you can’t really miss it. The great thing about it is that it will seek out your search term from everywhere it can possibly look.

You can type something (anything!) and Teams will show you everywhere it can find that word, including chat and channel messages, people, and files:

If you’re doing some real detective work, you can even filter down on the messages (within a certain time range for example) and files (ie who it was modified by):

So in theory it should be easy to find anything you want in Teams (in theory…)

Saved Messages

Did you know you can save chat messages in Teams? I don’t do this personally but maybe it will be useful to you.

As usual you can find that option hiding under the 3 dots if you hover over the message:

Once you’ve saved it though, it’s not terribly obvious where it goes…

You can find all your saved messages by typing /saved in the command bar at the top of Teams:

Then you’ll be able to see all your saved messages in a list:

As I say, it’s not immediately obvious as a feature, so I’d recommend finding some way to remind yourself to check these if you’re going to use them.

Settings

THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!

The famous 3 dots (are they famous? They are now…) are hiding in many crevices of Teams.

There are settings for

Teams in general
Chat messages
Channels
Teams
Channel messages
Files
Folders
Apps

And I’m not going through them all or we’d be here all day. General advice is – if you see 3 dots, have a click and see what you can do. I find that there’s usually something cool hiding in there!

Sharing

You might already know that you can share files and folders with others while you’re using Teams – that’s under the good old 3 dots again if you hover over a document.

You also get the option to share with someone as read-only, so they can look but not touch, which can sometimes be handy: