Find Your Way Around

Chat

The main view for Teams will be your chats. This can also be shown by pressing ‘Ctrl + 2’

Your chats will automatically be arranged by most recent message received. Any person-to-person chats, group chats or meeting chats will be displayed here. If you want a specific chat to always be at the top, then right click it and select ‘Pin’.

You can create a new chat and add as many people as you need. You can also add a new person to an existing chat by pressing the people icon at the top right of your chat. By default, they don’t have access to the chat history before they joined, but you can amend that.

There is also by default a chat with yourself. This is a great place to write notes and save files. Nobody else can see this chat.

Calendar

Click on the Calendar icon at the right panel or press ‘Ctrl + 4’ for the calendar view.

There is a drop down where you can select between seeing a Day or week view, as well as just seeing your meetings directly. There is another dropdown where you can select which date range you want to see. Click on the meeting to see the joining options.

Set Up Meetings

Meetings you are invited to are automatically added to the calendar with a checked outline. You must manually accept or decline them. Declining them does not delete the meeting for others. You can utilise categories to change the colours of each meeting for easier organisation. Chats for the meeting come up separately on your chat view. (Ctrl + 2)

Creating New Meetings

In the Calendar view, you can create your own meetings by clicking ‘New Meeting’. Any meeting that you create in teams will be automatically added to everyone invited’s outlook calendars as well, so it doesn’t matter which one you create the meeting on or which one they generally use.

Select a Title, a Location, message and the Invitees for your meeting. Along the top bar you will see specific settings such as adding categories or whether others can forward the invite. You can even make the meeting a reoccurring one so you can create a series of meetings easily.

The lobby is a holding area where people can be invited into the meeting. You can select it for everyone, or just for people outside of your organisation, depending on what level of screening you need.

Share and Collaborate

Within Meetings

When you are within a meeting, you have several options for display and functionality.

Your camera and microphone can be toggled on and off with the click of a button. The dropdowns here also allow you to change the settings, such as displaying a blurred background or choosing a different microphone.

You can share content to a meeting. Sharing a screen means that people will be able to see exactly what you see on that screen. Sharing a window means they will only be able to see that window’s display, even if you click onto something else.

The top ribbon will give you useful tools such as raising your hand, reacting with an emoji, or starting a poll.

Teams View

The teams view can be opened by clicking on it or pressing ‘Ctrl + 3’. You can be a member of multiple teams at once, and each team will have multiple channels. This is synced to your SharePoint profile. So any changes made in one will also be reflected in the other.

Since these are shared views between you and your colleagues. This is the best place to do collaborative work on teams. You can share files  and notes very easily.