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

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

L is for… Loop

Have you heard of Loop yet? Microsoft calls Loop a “co-creation app”, which (in theory) makes it easier for people to work together across various things. It’s in public preview at the moment, which means that Microsoft is still working on some of the features, but is keen to get real user feedback.

Let’s look at some real-life ways you might use Loop in Microsoft Teams chat (I don’t think you can use it in Channels yet).

Firstly – let’s get you familiar with how to get to Loop in chat. Here’s the little symbol you’re looking for:

And these are the options that you get once you click on it:

Here are my ideas for things you might use this for in your day-to-day work:

Quickly co-edit written content

You’re on the Marketing team and you’re putting together a social media post about an upcoming new product feature.

You’re not sure about some of the more technical terms, so you start a chat with one of the developers. You could use the ‘paragraph’ Loop option to pop in your social media post text, and when you send the loop component, the developer can see and edit the text straight away:

You even get a little summary at the top to show you who has edited the text and when:

Ok, so you can also co-edit a Word document, sure, but this is quicker! You don’t have to set up and save a document, invite people to edit it with a share link, get them to actually open it up, track their changes etc etc – all the changes happen right there in the written content inside the chat window. Slick as you like.

On-boarding task list

You’ve just taken on a new team member and they need to go through a list of on-boarding tasks.

Set up a Teams chat with them and use the ‘task list’ Loop component:

You can give them a list of all their onboarding tasks, and even set due dates.

You’ll easily be able to track progress by getting real-time updates when your new team member ticks things off the list. Again, it’s right there in Teams chat – no need for separate documents or (shock horror) bits of paper.

And, if you need an audit trail, the Loop is saved in your Teams chat files:

Voting on dates for a team get together / dinner location

If you’ve ever had the pleasure (it’s not pleasurable) of arranging anything in-person for a team, you know how hard it can be to narrow down even simple logistics like dates and locations!

By using a Loop ‘voting table’ in Teams chat you can narrow things down a lot quicker. Using the voting table is easy – you get a bunch of default options:

But by clicking on the column headings you can easily narrow them down to something like this:

People just have to click to cast their votes, and you can see who has voted for what by hovering over the voting numbers. And again it’s all in chat so really easy for everyone to access.

Use it for meeting agendas

Ahead of your weekly team meeting, why not set up a ‘numbered list’ Loop component in your team group chat. You can list out the meeting agenda and encourage people to add their own items, which you’ll see being added in real time.

You can reference the list during the meeting, and always have the latest updates, even if someone adds an item halfway through the meeting. There’s no clunky sharing around of documents, it’s all just there.

Those are just a few ways I can think of that Loop can streamline work that you do with other people. And let’s face it, most of our work involves other people.

With every Loop component you also get the option to create a copy, as well as see who has access: