Other than meetings, one of the core experiences of Microsoft Teams is chatting. You can chat with just one coworker, or you can chat with multiple people in one thread. There’s plenty more that you can do with chats in Teams, however, and there are also some tips and tricks too. In this guide, we’ll give you a look at our top five tips for chatting in Microsoft Teams.
Trick #1: Use Shift+Enter to start a new line
One of the most frustrating things about Microsoft Teams is that pressing Enter on your keyboard might often send out your message before you’re ready. To avoid this, you can press Shift+Enter to insert a line break into your chat. Another tip is that you’ve previously opened up the formatting options, you can also just the Enter key to start a new line, and skip this trick altogether.
Trick #2: Use formatting to spice up your messages
Microsoft Teams is a bit like Microsoft Word, as messages and chats have lots of formatting options. You can try out this formatting by clicking the Format box under the message. You can bold, italics, underline and even change the color of your text. Font size can also be changed to emphasize text, and you can even insert blockquotes, lists, and permalinks. You can check out other options by clicking More Options … to see more. These include putting in tables.
Trip #3: Try out chat in channels too
Private chats have their own experience which can be summoned by clicking the chat icon in the left hand-bar of Microsoft Teams, but did you know you can chat in channels too? When you visit a channel in Teams, there is a tab called Posts. This is the other core chatting experience in Teams, and, if you want, you can create separate channels for public-facing group chats.
Posts in a channel are public and are seen as a giant group chat. Anyone who has access to this channel can see the messages in posts. It is important to note, though, that messages put in posts in channels will stay forever, and can also be put in threads. It’s also best to reply to messages in channels to keep a clean and concise experience known as threaded conversations.
Tip #4: Find and search for your messages
It’s one thing to chat with your coworkers in Teams, but what if you want to find a specific message from a chat they sent to you? There are multiple ways you can do this. First, you can head to the command box at the top of the screen and enter in the word or message that you’re looking for, and press Enter. You’ll get a list of results that include that word.
You also can try the filter function to show certain types of messages. From your activity feed, you can select Filter to show only certain types of messages, like unread messages or, ones where you were @’ed, or gotten replies and likes.
Finally, you can use the saved messages feature to your advantage. Whenever you see a message you want to save, just click the bookmark icon to select Save Message. Once you do that you can see all your saved messages by clicking your profile icon and choosing Saved. All your saved messages will then show up in the sidebar in Teams.
Tip #5: Mute and hide your chats
Sometimes, you might not want to delete a chat or conversation in Teams. In these cases, you can simply mute the chat from the chat list so you no longer get notifications. You can hide chat by clicking to open the chat list, selecting More options and then choosing Hide. The chat will then be hidden until someone posts a new message to it again. Similarly, you can also mute chats by clicking to open the chat, selecting More Options, and then choosing Mute. You’ll see an icon to remind you that the chat has been muted.
And that’s just the start!
These are just a few tips for chatting in Microsoft Teams. We’ve covered Teams extensively over the past few months. Some topics we’ve given a look at include how you can get the most out of your Meetings, how you can increase your productivity, and much more. Keep it tuned to OnMSFT for all your Teams news and information.
