Top tips for using Microsoft Teams

Top tips for using Microsoft Teams

Organise your teams and channels

In the sidebar at the left side of the app, click the Teams icon to open the Teams pane. You’ll see the teams that you’re a member of, with one or more channels below each team name.

By default, teams (and the channels below each team) appear in the order that you joined or created them. But as you use Microsoft Teams over time in your daily work, some teams and channels will become more important to you than others — and not necessarily in the order that the Teams app places them.

Pinning a channel moves it toward the top of the Teams pane for easy access. To do this, click the three-dot (More options) icon to the right of the channel name and select 'Pin' from the menu that opens. Repeat this process again to unpin a channel.

Hiding channels or teams

You can tidy up your Teams workspace by hiding channels or teams that you don't need to prioritise or work on at any given time.

To hide a channel or team, click the three-dot icon to the right of its name, then click 'Hide' from the menu that opens. To unhide a channel, look at the list of channels under a team name. At the end of this list is a link saying how many hidden channels that this team has; click this link to open a menu revealing the hidden channels. 

To unhide a team, look or scroll down to the end of the list of your teams, where you’ll see a hidden teams link. Click this to open the list of hidden teams. Click the three-dot icon to the right of a hidden team, then click 'Show' at the top of the menu that opens.

Quickly finding conversations or messages

In Teams, it’s easy to see all the conversations and messages that you’re a part of.

At the top of the left sidebar, click the 'Activity' icon. This opens the 'Feed' pane to the right. To the right of the Feed pane title bar, right-click the 'Filter' icon (three horizontal lines in a funnel shape) and select @Mentions from the menu that opens. Conversations that you’re a member of, and messages that you’re tagged in, will be listed in the Feed pane.

Saving messages

This trick can be handy if you want to compile a list of messages to catch up on or refer to later. Move the pointer to the upper-right of a message that you want to save, click the three dots icon, and click ‘Save this message’ from the menu that opens.

To see a list of your saved messages, click your profile headshot or icon at the upper right of the Teams app and click ‘Saved from the menu’ that opens. The messages that you saved will appear in the Saved pane toward the left side of the Teams app.

Get someone's attention

Channels typically contain many conversations — and many messages within those conversations — so it can be easy to overlook a message. To make sure a specific person on your team sees a particular message, tag them as you write your message by typing @username. (Replace “username” with the person’s user name, of course.)

Or: After you type @, a menu opens listing the names of people in your organisation. Click a name on this list to tag them in your message.) Once you post the message, the person will get a notification as a prompt to read it and respond to it.