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…

T is for Translate, Templates and Together Mode

What a terrific trio of features beginning with T…

Translate

Did you know that you can translate chat messages from another language into yours? It can be tricky trying to communicate if you both don’t speak the same language well, but Teams lets you translate individual chat messages easily.

Click on the 3 dots for the chat message and choose translate from more options:

Then instead of this:

You’ll see this:

And the little squiggles let you know that it’s been translated – pretty cool!

Templates

There can be a lot of effort required to set up a Teams team the exact way you want it. It’s especially tiring if you’re working on something repeatable that needs the same kind of channels and apps every time, like organising an event maybe.

Luckily – Teams has a Templates feature that can help with that!

Go to Join or create a Team and choose Create team:

Then select one of the Templates that Teams offers you:

When you’ve selected a Template, Teams will tell you the channels it’s going to create for you and the apps it’s going to use:

You get to set the visibility as normal, and then you get to customise some of the setup, including the name of the Team and channels:

Once you press Create, Teams will do all the legwork of setting up the channels for you, so you don’t have to slog through it all.

The Event template has some useful things already in it too, like a content scheduler and event information page that you can use as the basis for your event.

If you have a Team that already suits your needs, you can also copy that as a new Team at the Create team stage:

You can customise what gets copied over:

And Bob’s your Uncle*; your customised Team is ready without you having to do it all yourself. Could be a real time saver.

Together Mode

This one’s fun!

If you’re in a meeting with a few people (who are all on camera) and you want it to feel a bit more like you’re all in the same place, you can turn on Together Mode and play pretend!

When you’re in the meeting, click on View in the top menu:

Then you can change the view:

(If you don’t see this option on your Teams meetings – this feature isn’t available to you, sorry!)

You’ll be reminded that when you change the view, everyone in the meeting will see the same view:

Then you can select a ‘scene’ to put everyone in and voila – it looks like you’re all together!

(I mean… this illustration would be a lot better if there were actually other people in it but I couldn’t get any willing volunteers…)

You can find out more about Together mode here: Teams Together Mode | Microsoft Teams

That’s T all done. Time for an actual tea I think. (As far as I know there’s no feature for Teams to make me a tea as yet, shame.)

If you enjoyed this, check out the rest of my A-Z of Teams posts here:

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

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

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

Lyndsay’s A-Z of Microsoft Teams – C is for… (Part 1) – Lyndsay Ansell’s Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Teamsing! 

*For non UK folk; “Bob’s your uncle” is an English phrase for which I do not know the origin but it sort of means ‘ta-daa’. I don’t know who Bob was originally the uncle of.