2020

33 TIME-SAVING TIPS
FOR MICROSOFT TEAMS
3rd edition

This eBook contains some amazing time saving tips to help you
and your team get the most out of Microsoft Teams.

From basic user tips to more advanced features, as with most of

Microsoft's tools, there are always features you hadn't realised
were there that can save you time, make you more productive,
or are just fun and cool. We hope we have covered a good few
of them for you here.
Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 4

Tip 1. Meetings with external or Guest users ...................................................................................... 5

So, who can attend these meetings? ................................................................................................. 8

i. Web meeting ...................................................................................................................................... 8

ii. A user with an email, added as a Guest user ......................................................................... 9

iii. Anyone with a phone ..................................................................................................................... 9

Tip 2. Meeting Scheduling in Teams ...................................................................................................... 9

Tip 3. Guests - The other stuff they can do ....................................................................................... 11

What can a guest do? ............................................................................................................................ 13

Tip 4. Apps and Actions from the Command Box ........................................................................... 16

Other Useful Shortcut Keys ..................................................................................................................... 18

Tip 5. Spruce up your channels with images ..................................................................................... 19

Tip 6. Get the most out of Chats and Conversations ..................................................................... 20

Tip 7. Bookmarking Messages ................................................................................................................ 22

Tip 8. Navigation Buttons (< >) ............................................................................................................. 24

Tip 9. Tabs for all occasions..................................................................................................................... 25

Tip 10. Don't put all your eggs in 'General' ....................................................................................... 27

Tip 11. How to publish an RSS Feed post to Microsoft Teams as a card (Using Zapier) .. 28

Tip 12. Translation of Teams Messages .............................................................................................. 29

Tip 13. All your Wikis in one place ........................................................................................................ 30

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Tip 14. Record your Teams meetings .................................................................................................. 31

Tip 15. Work on Visio in a Microsoft Teams Tab ............................................................................. 33

Tip 16. Zoom in and out ........................................................................................................................... 34

Tip 17. Microsoft Immersive Reader for Teams ............................................................................... 35

Tip 18. Something to hide?... Use Background Effects .................................................................. 36

Tip 19. Use Existing Team as a Template or Create a Team from your existing Office 365
Group............................................................................................................................................................... 39

Selecting Team Option ......................................................................................................................... 41

Selecting Office 365 Group ................................................................................................................. 41

Tip 20. Use Chrome profiles to Manage more than one Teams Login.................................... 41

Tip 21. Secret Teams Developer Menu from the System Tray .................................................... 43

Tip 22. Send or Forward an Email into a Teams Channel ............................................................. 45

Tip 23. How to change the display order of your Channels. ....................................................... 46

Tip 24. Get Planner Notifications in your Teams Team ................................................................. 48

What does this mean? ........................................................................................................................... 48

Tip 25. Post a message to multiple Channels at once ................................................................... 49

Tip 26. Announcement within a Channel ........................................................................................... 50

Tip 27. Share your system sound in a Team meeting .................................................................... 52

Tip 28. Whiteboard in Teams Meetings .............................................................................................. 54

Tip 29: Broadcasting a Teams Meeting using OBS to Social Platforms................................... 57

What is OBS? ............................................................................................................................................ 57

Why use OBS? .......................................................................................................................................... 57

How do we broadcast our Team meeting? ................................................................................... 57

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Tip 30. How to use Breakout rooms in Teams .................................................................................. 58

What is a Breakout Room? .................................................................................................................. 58

How to do it? ............................................................................................................................................ 58

Tip 31. Using tags against Team Members to be able to @Mention Groups ...................... 60

Tip 32. How to create a quiz or poll in Microsoft Teams .............................................................. 62

Creating a Poll in your Teams Team ................................................................................................ 62

Creating a Quiz in your Teams Team as a Tab ............................................................................. 64

Tip 33. Some Useful Links ........................................................................................................................ 67

Need help with Microsoft Teams? ........................................................................................................ 68

Why use MicroJobs to hire Microsoft Freelancers? .................................................................... 68

How does MicroJobs work, and what about payment? ............................................................ 69

3
Introduction
Microsoft Teams is now massive. We thought that the figures were impressive in March
2019, with over 500,000 organisations using it, and 13 million active daily users. These

figures were already growing massively at the start of 2020. However, the Covid-19
pandemic arrived and turned all our lives a little upside down, forcing two years' worth

of Digital transformation in 2 months. In March 2020, the Active Daily users had reached
a massive 44 million users; however, it did not stop there. The forced Digital

Transformations and Global change in working patterns and practices pushed that
figure to a massive 75 Million daily active users by the end of April 2020. With these

figures continually growing, it is becoming one of the most popular chat and
collaboration applications out there.

However, for many users, it can be overwhelming when first getting started, given the
array of functionality available. The tips in this eBook will help everyone from beginner

through to the more advanced user get the most out of Microsoft Teams.

As with most of Microsoft's tools, there are always features you hadn't realised were

there that can save you time, make you more productive, or are just fun and cool. We
hope we have covered a good few of them for you here.

So, let's get started!

4
Tip 1. Meetings with external or Guest users
Many people will have used Skype for business by adding it to meetings directly into the
invite in Outlook, a handy feature. Well, you can do that with Microsoft Teams and

pretty much in the same way:

Question and Answer from Ingeborg Hawighorst: "What needs to be in place for the 'New

Teams Meeting' to show up in the Outlook ribbon?". Answer - If you have the Teams

Desktop client installed, Outlook will see an add-in for Teams, which will automatically

be enabled. If you don't have the desktop client installed, you won't be able to see the
ribbon icon.

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On the Outlook online UI, you can arrange a Teams meeting, you simply go to your

Calendar and create a 'New Event,' and in the meeting details window, you can select
'Teams meeting' as the location.

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As you can see from the screenshot below, in both scenarios, the meeting invite has the

link to the Teams meeting at the bottom for attendees to click on when the meeting
time comes.

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So, who can attend these meetings?

Well, anyone with an email address can attend, whether or not they have a Teams

account, which is really neat. There are a few ways users outside and inside your
organisation can take part in your Teams meeting. Here are the three main ones:

i. Web meeting
Anyone with an email and internet connection can access the call via the browser,

simply by clicking on the link within the meeting invite and then clicking the 'Join on the
web instead' button.

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While the resulting interface is quite restricted for the attendee on the web, you cannot

share a camera or screen but can view other members shared screens. It is still a great
way to have a conference call in Teams, without all attendees being in Teams.

ii. A user with an email, added as a Guest user

If the user has been added as a Guest user in Teams and has access to the Teams

application on their device, then instead of clicking 'Join on the web instead', they would
select 'Open Microsoft Teams' option and get a much richer experience of the meeting

in Microsoft Teams as a Guest.

iii. Anyone with a phone

You can have dial-in conference options so people can join your meetings in Microsoft
Teams from almost any device, anywhere. You need to have Audio Conferencing, which

comes with Office 365 Enterprise E5 subscription or is available on a pay-per-minute

basis as an add-on to Office 365 E1 or E3 subscription. Where the Audio Conferencing is

enabled, users will automatically see the dial-in options for Microsoft Teams meetings
that are created.

Take a look at these two blog posts for some further info

• 9 Tips for Meeting with Microsoft Teams.

• 9 tips for having the best online meeting experience with Microsoft Teams

Tip 2. Meeting Scheduling in Teams

This one is closely related to number 1; however, the simple features are always the best,
in my opinion, so I figured it was worth a separate section.

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You can schedule meetings from within Teams. From within a team or channel, you can

click the small camera icon to meet now or using the same icon you can also choose to
schedule a meeting as you would in Outlook.

You can also see your Calendar and meetings within teams by clicking the meetings icon
on the left-hand panel. When scheduling from within Teams, you get this window:

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It has the option to add the Teams channel, or it will Show the Teams channel you

triggered the meeting from. You can use the scheduling assistant as you can in Outlook
and the ability to select the people you would like to invite from your organisation.

Once scheduled, the result is a calendar invite in Outlook with the relevant Teams link in
it to click and join the meeting when the time comes. This diary entry will also display in

Teams when you click on the Calendar icon from the Teams left-hand panel.

Tip 3. Guests - The other stuff they can do

The above meeting functionality shows that there are various features you or your guest
can make use of in your Teams, providing some great ways of working with people

outside of your organisation. Well, it doesn't stop there. Guests can participate in
channels, conversations, chats, and meetings; they can share files in channels, add new

channels, and use the Wiki, which provides some fantastic collaboration opportunities.
This Microsoft Documentation page gives a good summary of Guest versus Team

member capabilities.

Note: Guest access is available on the desktop, web, iOS, and Android apps.

All a user needs to be a Guest is an email address. Once you have this, adding a guest
can be done by a Team owner and is almost too simple!

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Click on the three dots '…' next to the team you want to add them to, be sure it's the

correct one. As I said above, it is almost too simple, so you could easily add someone to
the wrong team and get into all sorts of trouble. Then in the window that pops up, just

enter the email and click add. You can add more than one at a time in the same window.

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What can a guest do?

This post from the Microsoft support site best describes the different capabilities of

Team Owner, Member, and Guest. Every member of Teams has a role, and each one has
different permissions.

Owners
Team owners manage certain settings for the team. They add and remove members,

add guests, change team settings, and handle administrative tasks. There can be
multiple owners in a team.

Members
Members are the people in the team. They talk with other team members in

conversations. They can view and usually upload and change files. They also do the
usual sorts of collaboration that the team owners have permitted.

Guests

Guests are people from outside of your organisation that a team owner invites, such as
partners or consultants, to join the team. Guests have fewer capabilities than team

members or team owners, but there's still a lot they can do.

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This table gives a great summary of the capabilities of each role via the desktop:

14
And on Mobile:

You can also manage guest permissions via the 'Manage Team' option, again by clicking
on the three dots '…' next to the team.

In this menu, you can see your members, add and delete members, manage channels,
manage settings, and manage Apps. With a mix of the Guest permission and the other
settings, you can choose to set the team up to be fully interactive with all members and

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guests, or you can lock down to just the owner being able to post, which might be

useful as an announcement or information channel.

All in all, the functionality and Collaboration that Guest access enables for users and

organisations is fantastic!

Tip 4. Apps and Actions from the Command Box

The search bar at the top is hiding more than just search functionality, it has some great
'shortcut' app and command options, some of which are really useful… A great shortcut

key to get to the bar is CTRL+E.

All you have to do to see what's on offer is type '/' for the commands that work

standalone or '@' to see the Apps commands, give it a go.

Once installed, the apps can be accessed by clicking on the '…' at the bottom of the
conversation window. This allows you to share the search result, or item from the
relevant app in the conversation, a great way to interact with Apps and your teams.

16
So back to the Command Bar, the shortcuts in here can be useful, here are just a few of

my favourites:

• /whatsnew – This has to be the most useful one given the speed that MS
release changes these days. This takes you to the Release notes tab in the T-Bot

channel. Worth a regular check.

• @Wikipedia – Allows you to do a Wikipedia search. Returns a summary that

you can click on to go to the full Wikipedia page.

• /goto – If you have a lot of teams or channels or spend a lot of time, as I do, in
the Chat part of teams, then this is a good way to hop straight to your
destination.

• /unread – Helps in those busy times, and pulls up a list of all your unread items
• /mentions – Gives a list of all your @Mentions. This will include direct tags or
where a team you are in has been tagged.

• /files – Shows your recent files and allows you to search and go to the file you
want rather than having to click around your teams to find what you need.

• /keys – This is a shortcut to show shortcuts. Nice quick reference for the MS
Teams Keyboard Shortcuts.
• /call – This allows you to type the first few letters of the person you want to call

and select them to call. In big organisations, this could be very timesaving.

• /help – Pretty self-explanatory and straightforward. A really good quick way to

ask a question of the Teams help via the T-Bot.

• /saved – This takes you straight to your list of saved messages.

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Other Useful Shortcut Keys
• Navigation of the Left navigation panel - Ctrl + 1+ 2 + 3 – i.e. Ctrl + 1 =
Activity feed; Ctrl +2 = Chat; Ctrl + 3 = Teams etc

• An Emoji for every occasion - Type a colon “:” immediately followed by a

word - to discover additional emojis (e.g. :disapointed or :frog)

• Move your Teams around - Ctrl + Shift + up or down arrow - Moves the
Team you have selected up in the Teams Panel on the left hand side, up or down

in your list of Teams.

• What you really need! - CTRL + ‘.’ – Ctrl and the Full stop key together,

probably should be first in this list, as it gives you all the shortcuts you can use

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Tip 5. Spruce up your channels with images
If you want to give your channels a bit of an eye-catching makeover, then fear not, it's
easy! To achieve this, all you need to do is edit the channel name, copy a Unicode

character, and paste it in.

To locate a relevant image, use a Unicode Character Finder resource. Then once you

have found the image you want, copy the Unicode to the clipboard, edit the channel,
paste the code in front of the channel name and save it.

This is an ideal tip if you want to bring more prominence to a particular channel.

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Tip 6. Get the most out of Chats and Conversations
So, we all know how chat works and can pretty much do it without thinking, but I
figured it was worth putting together a list of basic and best bits for Chats and

Conversations in Teams.

Chats – These are done via the Chat tab on the left-hand menu and are more
traditional chats where you can have 1-to-1 or group chats. Probably best compared to
a chat in domestic Skype.

Conversations – While on the face of it very similar to chats, this gives some structure
and context to your conversation, to allow better collaboration in a more focused way.

The interface is very similar to chat; however, with some subtle differences worth
mentioning, so below is an example of a couple of conversations within a channel:

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As you can see, there can be several conversations going on at once, around specific

subjects or documents. If used correctly, this helps keep track of conversations, here are
some tips for conversations:

• Reply – The 'Reply' option under each conversation should be used to add
further points to that conversation.

• New Conversation – The bottom chat entry is used to start a new chat, this is
the one most commonly misused, as people try to use it to reply to the
conversation above when they should have used the 'Reply' option.

• Conversation on a Document – To start the conversation on an existing

document, open the document in teams and then click 'Start Conversation' at the

top. To start on a new document, click the paperclip and upload the document,
this will start the conversation and upload the document to the files tab of the

Channel or Chat you are in at the same time.

• Subject – When creating a conversation, it is good to add a subject – By Clicking

the 'A' icon you get more edit options. Adding the title helps keep focus and
context to that conversation.

• @mention – Also when starting a conversation or asking a specific question, it's

good to use the @mention functionality to either get the whole channel's

attention, by using the name of the channel, or a given team member name. The
relevant people then get alerted to this new reply or conversation.

• GIFs – In both chat and conversation, if it is enabled on your Microsoft Teams by

the administrator, you can brighten up everyone's day and use the GIFs. Just click

the GIF icon and have a look around, don't blame me if it distracts you from your
work for a while!

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 • Praise – A Great little option on the chat and conversation boxes is the small
medal/badge icon that allows you to give open Praise to teams members that

appears in the conversations feed. Good for Team Morale!

• Meetings – I have already mentioned this earlier in the post, but worth a
mention again – you can click the camera icon Under the new message box to
either start a meeting now or schedule one for the future.

Tip 7. Bookmarking Messages

This is a handy piece of functionality that allows you to save a particular message, or
more accurately a position in a conversation or chat, just by clicking on the 3 dots '…'

menu next to the message:

Then to recall all your saved messages, you simply click on your profile picture top right

and select 'Saved' or possibly quicker would be to type in the command bar '/saved'.
This gives you a list of all your saved points in the left-hand pane and clicking on them

takes you back to the point in the conversation you saved them from.

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23
Tip 8. Navigation Buttons (< >)
The simple tips are the best! When I first started using Teams, my impression was that it
was great, but had some challenges in regards to multitasking. Every time I went from

working in a tab in a given team to continue a chat, by clicking on the chat icon, and
then to go back, I would always have to click all the way through back to where I was. I

was missing something, and it was these navigation buttons:

Now when I have come from another channel because someone messages me or

similar, I can easily click back, and also forward again to toggle. I'm finding this vastly
improves my Teams Experience.

24
Tip 9. Tabs for all occasions
A must for productivity and ease of access within your working group is taking
advantage of the tabs within your Teams and Channels. They can be used to simply

expose a website or file to be easily accessible, or to show more complex Apps to

manage work and help with day to day activities.

All you need to do to add a tab is click the '+' sign on the right-hand side of your
Channel and then search for the thing you want to add in. The more popular Apps, are

at the top with more available below:

25
There are too many to mention them all; however, here are some of the ways I have

found tabs useful in Teams:

• Simply Exposing Office documents or Websites on a tab for quick

reference – I have found this useful in many scenarios from quick access to

templates through to tracking spreadsheets of various kinds. In fact, we recently

placed the Collab365 Teams live show onto a tab in our Collab365 Teams based

Community (so far with over 1800 Members in as Guests to our tenant). My

recommendation would be that any File or Website that all team members
reference daily is worth considering adding as a tab.

• Task Management – Here at Collab365, we have used tabs to expose both

Microsoft Planner and tools like Trello, depending on the audience involved – The

quick access to tasks and scheduling is useful. There are more complex task and
project management apps that you can use from the store.

• OneNote – for those that love OneNote, you can create a OneNote tab and off
you go using OneNote within your Channel.

• Forms – Simply select 'Forms', and you can easily create a very powerful
form/survey that can be managed in teams, and with a tweak of the share
permissions, shared and filled in by anyone that has the link. The responses can

be seen on the tab by the form owner and also stored in a spreadsheet in the
files tab.

• Expose any existing SharePoint Document Library – Just select the

'SharePoint' icon fill, in site URL, select the document library you want from the

list, give the tab a name, and the library will be exposed in a Teams channel.

26
That is just a few of the tabs we have found useful, however, you only have to look at

the number of Apps in the store to know there are going to be tools of all shapes and
sizes, have a look around.

Tip 10. Don't put all your eggs in 'General'

When you first start using Teams, it is tempting to keep everything in the General

channel of your team, adding tab after tab for each need you come across. Now in some
circumstances with small teams, this is fine however, in most, it will lead to confusion

and makes it hard to find stuff as the Teams resources grow (or use of the team grows.)

So, here are some recommendations:

• Think of the General channel as the landing page for your Team, the hub for the
high-level interaction.

• Then for each subject area or main function in that Team, create a new Channel.
• When adding a tab to General, always ask yourself if this would work better as a

separate channel, or as a tab within another channel.

• The more tabs you add to General, the fewer people will find them. So, try the
rule that when the number of tabs doesn't fit on your standard working screen
size (different for everyone), start thinking about flipping the tabs to existing or

new channels.
• Finally, don't forget you can have more than one Team, so if you have a subject

area for files and conversations that don't fit in your existing Teams, create a new
Team with Channels and tabs for them.

27
Tip 11. How to publish an RSS Feed post to
Microsoft Teams as a card (Using Zapier)
For those that don't know, at Collab365 we run a 'Community Team' on our Teams

Tenant, and one of the challenges we wanted to solve was adding the Collab365 Today
posts to a channel and for them to look nice (as cards) like this:

We created a blog post showing the steps of how we did it... Read More

28
Tip 12. Translation of Teams Messages
You can now translate messages to your base language in Microsoft Teams on a
message by message basis. In this example, the original message is in French.

Simply click the '…' and choose 'Translate'

Et Voila – (Sorry, couldn't resist)

You can set it back to show the original language via the same menu. A great feature - I

think you will agree.

NB: If you do not see this option, then talk to your IT admin, as they may need to turn it

on for you to access it.

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Tip 13. All your Wikis in one place
If you are using the Wikis within teams, then this is a fantastic feature to help with your
productivity. Simply click '…' on the left-hand menu and choose 'Wiki'.

30
This will take you to the Wiki home page on your 'Personal 'Wiki tab, and this is a

great place for taking private notes.

Click on the 'All 'tab, and it gives you a summary view of all the Wikis you are involved

in, making it easy to navigate, consume, and update them.

A nice extra on the Personal Wiki is being able to add notes from anywhere using the
top command box. Just type '/wiki' and press enter, and you can then type your note.

Press enter again, and your note will be added. Press enter a third time, and it will take
you to your Personal Wiki.

Tip 14. Record your Teams meetings

You can record your Microsoft Teams meetings. The recording captures Audio, Video,
and any screen sharing activities. The meeting is recorded in the cloud and saved to

Stream, meaning you can manage, download, and share along with all your
organisation's other Video content.

At the most basic level, this allows you to have a record of what was discussed, so you
can go back to it at a later stage, or share with team members that could not attend.

This can also be used to easily create company or department announcements,

management team updates, news items, demos, solutions to common problems, or any

other communications you might use video for in your organisation.

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So how do we do it? Well, it couldn't be easier - once in the meeting just click the '…'

and click 'Start Recording' like this:

Once clicked, you will be told you are recording in a message at the top of the meeting.

Once finished, click stop recording from the same menu. The video is saved to Stream.
However, you will also see a link to it in the meeting chat window and be emailed a link

to it from Stream. Obviously, as with all your Stream video content, it does take up
space, so you need to ensure this use of Stream is included in your storage planning.

Here are a couple of links to help explain further and give other prerequisites and
considerations:

• Teams Cloud meeting recording

• Get started with Microsoft Stream
• End User Documentation: Record meeting in Teams

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Tip 15. Work on Visio in a Microsoft Teams Tab
If there was ever a tool that got the best productivity and results when worked on
collaboratively, it's Microsoft Visio. Well, now you can do this with your team from

within Teams. How cool is that?

Once you have uploaded the Visio file into a channel, you and your colleagues can alter

the diagram from directly inside Teams! You can also discuss the diagram within the
Teams conversation window while working on it as you go. I am sure you will agree, this

is a great way to get input and agreement from all stakeholders as you go, saving
everyone time and getting a better quality result.

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Tip 16. Zoom in and out
You no doubt are used to zooming in and out on your browser many times. Did you
know you can do exactly the same in the Teams desktop client?

All you need to do is press 'CTRL+' to zoom in and 'CTRL-' to zoom out.

At the time of writing this there's no way to zoom on the mobile apps.

NB: If you're using Teams in the browser you can also use the normal browser zoom

functionality.

34
Tip 17. Microsoft Immersive Reader for Teams
This functionality has been around in other Microsoft Tech for a little while and is
predominantly a tool in the Microsoft Education space, that's aimed at schools, colleges,

and teachers billed as a learning and accessibility tool. However, it can, of course, be
useful to a much wider audience than just schools, especially now that it is available in

Microsoft Teams. So how do you use it, and what can it do?

Firstly, to access a given message, use the three dots '…' and select it from the drop-

down.

It can read the text aloud, at different speeds. It can show in larger font size with
different colours and spacing. It can show syllables, verbs, nouns, adjectives, and sub-

clauses all in different colours, and even with labels.

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Tip 18. Something to hide?... Use Background Effects
If you've got something you don't want to share in the background, then it's pretty easy

to blur it out or add a background effect in a Teams video call/meeting.

This is handy functionality if you work in a busy office and have confidential information

on your walls. It’s also helpful if you work from home and have the risk of family life
crossing over to work-life in the background of your video calls.

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To activate Background Blur during meetings, just click on the more actions '…' three

dots on the call menu and select 'Background effects'.

EXTRA TIP: If your device supports it, click CTRL+Shift+P when you're on the call to
toggle the blur.

It gets better though, with Background effects, there are a number of effects given as
standard, from office backdrops to beaches:

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And to top it off you can add your own background effects just by clicking the 'Add
New' option and the top and uploading any of your photos. A nice way to brighten up

meetings and cover up your settings.

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Tip 19. Use Existing Team as a Template or Create a
Team from your existing Office 365 Group
While there is not the concept of a Template for your teams as such, there is some great

functionality for using existing teams as your template for creating a new team.

Within Microsoft Teams and on the 'Teams' list, at the bottom select 'Join or create a

team'. Here you will have the option to create or join a team.

Choose the 'Create Team' Option.

39
Then in the window that pops up, you have the option to 'Create from… An existing

Office 365 Group or Team'

Once selected, you then have the following two options:

40
Selecting Team Option

You will then be able to choose from a list of your existing Teams and will be guided

through the process where you are asked for the new team name, description and which
aspects of the originating team you would like to copy over.

For Larger Organisations or the initial rollout and adoptions of Teams, it may be worth
creating a team that is solely used as the template, possibly called 'Template Teams'.

This will help your users get started, as well as maintain a standard approach for your
Channels and Tabs within each team.

Selecting Office 365 Group

You will be presented with a list of existing Office 365 Groups that you own and that

don't currently have a Microsoft Team associated with them.

Select your desired group, and a team with the same name will be created

automatically. The team will share the same group privacy (public or private) and
members as the original group.

This is a great way to bring your existing SharePoint groups into Teams. This Microsoft
Post explains it in a little more detail.

Tip 20. Use Chrome profiles to Manage more than

one Teams Login
There are many reasons for needing to log into Teams with two different accounts.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams doesn't make account switching easy. If you have to
manage more than one login account for Teams, then it's a challenge as you can only be
logged into one account at a time.

41
There are a few options here. You can either use multiple (different) browsers, or you

can create another user within Chrome. Once set up, you can easily switch between the
two instances. The best part is that everything is separate, including logging on to other

Office 365 services.

Don't have Chrome?

• Join the other team as a guest using your ID.

• Login to the Teams desktop with one account and the browser version of Teams with
the other.

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Tip 21. Secret Teams Developer Menu from the
System Tray
That's right - there is a secret Developer menu you can access via the Teams icon in the

system tray. If you go into the system tray and right-click the Teams icon, you usually
get the standard menu that can take you to your status, settings, or open or quit the

Teams window.

However, there is a menu that can be accessed from here that has all sorts of goodies on it
for the Developers amongst you. Now don't laugh when I tell you the secret handshake, I
promise it works. All you have to do is double click the icon, then right-click all in quick
succession.

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If it doesn't work the first time, keep trying as it often takes 2 or 3 goes.

This Menu gives you access to various tools to help with your work with Teams.
However, the most useful is the 'Open DevTools' options, which allows you to debug

like you are in a browser.

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Tip 22. Send or Forward an Email into a Teams
Channel
Now it might sound a little odd that the new way we all talk can get a message from the

old way we all used to talk. However, emails are still widely used, and this flexibility with
Teams provides some great uses, in particular when dealing with larger teams.

This is a great way to get an announcement, news, or information in front of your team
quickly. You may send the message to their email addresses as well, however as people

are moving increasingly towards managing their day-to-day work and communications
within Teams, sending a message in this way is likely to get the highest (and probably

fastest) read rate.

All you need to do is click the three dots '...' against the channel and select 'Get email

address'. You can then copy the address and use it in your emails as you would any
other.

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When a message is sent to the channel, it will appear as a conversation on that channel.

Tip 23. How to change the display order of your

Channels.
As the number of channels within your team grows, you may realise one day, maybe for
efficiency of use or Logical layout, that you would like to change the order of your

channels.

Well, you cannot as such change or fix the order of your channels, and the General

Channel is always fixed at the top no matter what. However, it is worth noting that the
channels display order is alphabetical or to be more accurate alphanumerical order.

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If you have the following set of Channels you want to re-order, you could give them

different names to get a better order:

Or, an easier option would be to give numbers to your Channel names:

There you have it, your teams nicely ordered how you want them.

Note: There is, however, one thing to be aware of; renaming the Channel retrospectively

in this way does not rename the SharePoint folder.

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Tip 24. Get Planner Notifications in your Teams Team
In your Teams Channel, you can organize your tasks by adding one or more Planner
tabs. You can then work on your plan from within Teams or in Planner for web, remove

or delete your plan, and get notified in Teams when a task is assigned to you in Planner.

What does this mean?

Team members of a team with a Planner tab will receive a Teams notification when a
Planner task is assigned to them by another person. This provides a fantastic way to
manage and assign tasks with your team, all within the Teams workspace.

The Teams notification appears in the Teams Activity Feed and in Chat. It contains the

task title, who assigned you the task, the plan the task belongs to, and a link to open the
task details in Teams. You can see a record of past Teams notifications in the chat

conversation with Planner.

The alerts and functionality can be enabled or disabled both at the individual and admin

level.

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Tip 25. Post a message to multiple Channels at once
A cool function if you have information or an announcement that needs to be shared
across multiple teams and channels.

Go to the conversations tab of the channel you want to start from. In the Start new
conversation box at the bottom, click the format button, the 'A' with a pencil next to it.

Then in the top of the window, you can select 'Post in multiple channels' as you can see
below:

Once posted, the message will appear as a new conversation in each of the channels

you have selected. From that point onwards, they are separate conversations, and reply
messages in each of the channels will only show in that channel like it would with a

normal message. Even so, with an @General mention in the message, it is a great way of
getting an important message across a number of teams quickly.

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Tip 26. Announcement within a Channel
Another great way to catch your user's attention is an Announcement. Which, if used in
conjunction with posting to multiple channels, can be really powerful.

To start, go to the conversations tab of the channel you want to start from. In the Start
new conversation box at the bottom, click the format button, the 'A' with a pencil next

to it.

This time in the top left, select the down arrow next to 'New conversation' and choose

'Announcement,' as shown below:

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This provides a couple more options for your message over that of a standard message;

you can add a Headline, Format it, and add a background image with the buttons on the
right-hand side. Then you can add your Subheader and message content as with a

standard conversation.

As I mentioned above, you can then choose to post this to multiple channels as well,

giving you a great way to communicate that important announcement across many
channels and teams. Once posted, the message will appear in each of the channels

selected and will have a little red icon on the right-hand side, from that point onwards
though they are separate conversations. With an @General mention in the message, it is
a great way of getting an announcement across a number of teams quickly.

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Tip 27. Share your system sound in a Team meeting
You can now share your system sound with a team meeting so that you can share the
audio of a video you are showing while sharing your screen. Here at Collaboris and

Collab365, where we work remotely and deal with a lot of online summit sessions and
general video content, this is a really useful improvement for us to collaborate

effectively.

Doing this is really easy when you click the 'Share' button to share your screen from

within a Teams meeting.

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On the screen that pops up where you select the Window, Screen, or Application you

wish to share, ensure you click the 'Include system audio' checkbox.

This will share all your system sounds, which is great for viewing videos or listening to
some audio while sharing with your meeting. However, it is also worth noting that alerts

and notification sounds will also be heard in the meeting. Here are a couple of other key
points to consider if using this function:

• Teams and your computer need to be set to the same speaker. Adjust your
computer's audio output in your system settings and your Teams audio output in

your device settings in Teams.

• To avoid echo, remember to keep only one device's mic and speaker on in a

room.

Take a look at this Microsoft Support page on Sharing your system audio in a Teams

meeting for some further information on this.

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Tip 28. Whiteboard in Teams Meetings
Whiteboarding does have to be enabled for you to use it in Teams, but once it is, it is a
great way to interact remotely. Here is a post from Microsoft on How to Manage

Whiteboard in Microsoft Teams.

To use Whiteboard in a Teams meeting, you simply click the 'Share' button as you would

to share your screen, then on the right-hand side you select Microsoft Whiteboard.

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Here you can then collaborate on a whiteboard, using your mouse or Surface pen if you

have one.

The whiteboard can be accessed either before or after the meeting, via the Whiteboard
tab within the meeting.

Take a look at this post from Microsoft for More information.

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You can then access and share all the Whiteboards you are involved in by downloading

the Whiteboard app from the Microsoft Store. From this app, you can also create new
Whiteboards and share them directly into your Teams Channels.

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Tip 29: Broadcasting a Teams Meeting using OBS to
Social Platforms
It has become a talking point, How to get your Microsoft Teams meetings and Live

events broadcasted to your social media platforms?

Although there are a number of ways to achieve this, in this Teams Tip, we show you

how to do it using OBS Studio , which offers numerous ways to integrate with Microsoft
Teams.

What is OBS?

Open Broadcast Software, commonly referred to as 'OBS' is a free recording and

streaming platform predominantly used for streaming live video games to social media,
which makes it a great tool for live encoding video on Teams. Being open-source, its

community is vast and has a bold library of interesting and useful plugins to assist your
productivity and creativity.

Why use OBS?

It's free! It packs a lot of punch for no cost at all. I will be demonstrating how you can

use OBS to prepare your presentations in a way that will keep your students & clients
focused on just the important aspects. Your private stuff will remain private in a way that

will look very organised and professional.

How do we broadcast our Team meeting?

So, how do you do it? Take a look at this post and Video from Collab365's resident
broadcasting and video expert, Connor Deasey – Using OBS Studio with Microsoft
Teams to stream to YouTube, LinkedIn & Facebook

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Tip 30. How to use Breakout rooms in Teams
This is functionality that Microsoft is currently working on adding to Teams, however,
this tip discusses how it can be achieved with standard functionality, a little bit of

preparation, and some participant guidance.

What is a Breakout Room?

Breakout Rooms and Breakout sessions are subgroups of the main Session, Meeting or
Lesson to enable the larger groups to be split into smaller working groups to discuss
and collaborate on the given subject.

Although of most use in training and education situations, this can also be used for

project planning, requirements, and other types of workshops.

How to do it?

You can achieve Breakout rooms by having the main meeting within a specific Teams
Team, in the General Channel, and then at the same time have a channel in that team

for each breakout room you need, and starting a meeting in each of these channels
without closing the main meeting.

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Once all the meetings are up and running, you can tell your attendees to leave the main

meeting and go to the channel-specific meeting, for the breakout group you want them
to join and participate in. You, as the person running the session, are then able to hop

between the meetings by clicking the triangle play button on the play bar for each
meeting.

Doing this takes you into that meeting while putting the other meetings on hold. You

can do this as many times as you like. Make sure you don't click the end meeting button
on any of the meetings until all the sessions are over.

Once the Breakout sessions are over, you can visit each session and ask them to leave
the meeting and rejoin the main meeting. They can do this by navigating to the Team

the meeting started on, clicking on the General channel, and clicking the 'Join' button
that will be shown in the conversation feed.

This probably sounds more complicated than it is, so we have put together a full blog
post explaining how to do this here. – How to Create Breakout Rooms in Microsoft

Teams

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Tip 31. Using tags against Team Members to be able
to @Mention Groups
This is a fantastic way of grouping your team members so that you can send messages

in the Team with @mentions that only alert a subset of people in the team. It can be
particularly useful for larger Teams.

There are a couple of ways to allocate the tags, you can do it on a user by user basis, or
you can bulk add users to tags using the Manage tags option.

To do this, navigate to your Team, click the '…' menu and select 'Manage Tags'.

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From here, you can see all your Tags and which team members have them as well as

Create new tags and allocate to Teams members, as shown below:

The second way to do this is by choosing the 'Manage Team' option from the same '…'
menu. Here, against each member of your team, you can choose the tag option to be

able to allocate and unallocated tags for that user, you can also create new tags here if
needed:

Once you have your tags set up, this allows you to use each tag in an @mention format

in a conversation. E.g In the example below, this message will appear as an alert in the
activity feed for all the people with the tag 'Challenger'.

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This gives some nice flexibility for applying some grouping to your Team members so

you can target different messages to them, without having to have each group of
members in a different team.

Tip 32. How to create a quiz or poll in Microsoft

Teams
Both of these are a great way to get more engagement on teams and can be both fun
and useful.

Creating a Poll in your Teams Team

This is so easy and quick to do that once you start, you won't be able to stop. In the

team and channel where you want to do a Poll, and click on the '…' menu below the
start conversation box and type ‘Forms’ in the search bar that appears.

Select 'Forms', and this will open the Create new poll window where you can enter your
question and the answer options, you can also allow multiple answers if needed. The

tool will also suggest answers for you once you type your question.

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Click 'Next' to see a preview of your Poll question and then 'Send' it to the Channel

conversation feed.

The Poll will appear in the Conversation feed with the question first followed by the
summary of answers below it. A really simple way to do a quick Poll.

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Creating a Quiz in your Teams Team as a Tab

This is a little more complicated than adding Polls to your teams, but it is a great way to

inject some fun into your team, or to assess learning and understanding on a particular
subject.

Microsoft Teams for Education has some slight additions to standard Microsoft Teams,
making quizzes and tests slightly easier. For this Tip, we are concentrating on how to use

standard Microsoft Teams and Forms to create a quiz in a tab on a Teams channel. This
approach could also be used to create a Team survey.

Firstly, open Forms in your browser, you will need to log in with the same account that
you logon to Teams with. Here you can create a new quiz and start to add your

questions. There are many types of questions you can ask from the standard Multiple or
Single choice, along with Text answers, through to more unusual formats like ranking

the order of things or rating how you feel about something. You can also allocate points

for correct answers as well as add different sections to your quiz to give it some
structure.

Once we have our Quiz Ready in Forms, we simply navigate to the Teams Team Channel
we want the quiz to be displayed in and click on the '+' icon to add a tab.

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Forms will likely be one of the top apps however, if not, you can search by typing

'Forms' in the search bar and then selecting it.

You will now be presented with several options, choose the 'Add an Exiting Form' option

and select your quiz.

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There you have it, a nice quiz in your Microsoft Teams Channel, and each member of the

team notified about it.

This is a great way to engage with your team, either just for fun or to test

understanding. Having it there in the place where work and collaboration are happening
should also make for a higher response rate.

We have put together a more detailed blog post on this which you can view here - How
to create a Poll or Quiz in Microsoft Teams

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Tip 33. Some Useful Links
That's it for the Teams tips: However, I just wanted to add some other useful resources
that might help you with your quest to learn more about Teams:

• Collab365 Community site has some great posts -

https://collab365.community/category/microsoft-teams/

• Microsoft interactive teams demo – https://teamsdemo.office.com/

• Collab365 Microsoft Teams Facebook group is one of our most popular Facebook

groups and a fantastic place to get help and questions answered -

https://www.facebook.com/groups/MicrosoftTeams

• Collab365 MicroJobs has some great Microsoft Teams Freelancers that you can
get help from by Booking an Expert Call as well as MicroJobs for you to get

training or wider help on your utilization of Microsoft team, take a look

- Collab365 MicroJobs

• Microsoft's Support site has some great resources including the really
useful Microsoft Teams FAQs

• Resources you can purchase from our Recent Teams Virtual Summit:
o Teams Virtual Summit - Session Recordings.

o Teams Virtual Summit eBook bundle

o Teams Nuggets Training Videos

That's all the tips folks, I hope you found them useful.

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Need help with Microsoft Teams?
We really hope this eBook has been a useful guide to help you get the most out of
Microsoft Teams.

However, as with everything, you may need some help from time to time. Maybe a 30-
60-minute call to discuss some of these Tips would be useful? Or, maybe you need help

with Rolling out Teams in your organization and getting your team trained up.

On Collab365 MicroJobs we have many Microsoft Teams skilled freelancers that can

help you:

• Most of our Experts are happy to provide Expert Calls. This page has some

featured Freelancers to look at – Book a Call

• Take a look at the fixed-priced Teams MicroJobs here - Microsoft Teams Category

• Or, post a Project Request for our Freelancers to provide you with a proposal and
quote for your specific need, find out more HERE.

Why use MicroJobs to hire Microsoft Freelancers?

At Collab365, we believe the way we work is changing dramatically. We documented our

thoughts in our Free to download eBook - 'Future of Work and what will it mean for your
job?'

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How does MicroJobs work, and what about payment?

Paying for online services with people that you don't know can be worrying for both parties.
The buyer often doesn't want to pay until they're happy that the Freelancer has completed
the work. Likewise, the Freelancer wants to be sure they will be recompensed for their time
and commitment. Collab365 MicroJobs helps both the buyer and the Freelancer in these
ways:

• The buyer pays upfront, and the money is securely held in the Freelancers MicroJobs

Stripe Connect platform account.

• The Freelancer can then begin the work in the knowledge that the payment has been
made.
• Once the buyer is happy that the work is complete and to their satisfaction, the funds
become available to the Freelancer.
• There's even a dispute management function in case of a disagreement. But it
shouldn't happen. As long as the deliverables are agreed upfront and both parties
keep talking the entire way through, you won't be disappointed.

Find out more about how MicroJobs works on this page.

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