Microsoft To Do doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Microsoft has eggs in many different productivity baskets (Project, Planner, To Do, Outlook Tasks, OneNote To-Do Tags, maybe more?). To Do excels thanks to its straightforward interface with just enough features to get the job done. Now, if you’re using To Do in MS Teams, you’re missing out on one of the best features, and I hope it gets added to Teams soon! Just a quick note, if you do use To Do in Teams, you can also use the To Do desktop app, and everything will stay synced up nicely.
Microsoft has made some significant changes to notification settings in Teams over the years, and they’ve just added another option to the list. Rather than having Teams-based notifications using the Teams look and feel, you can now opt to display Teams notifications in the native Mac or Windows notification style, depending on what machine you’re using. As far as I can tell, there’s no major advantage to using the Teams notification style over the Mac/Win style, so largely a personal preference.
There are many reasons why you may not need a Team anymore, like internal restructuring, dropping a client, or the conclusion of a project. Instead of deleting the team and losing all of that information, you can archive the team instead. This is helpful if there’s a chance you’ll need to have that team “active” again or if you want to keep it around for future reference. However, you don’t archive the team from the Teams app–instead, you’ll need to head to the Teams Admin Center. Note that you’ll need to be a Teams administrator to do this.
One of the newest features in Microsoft Teams is the ability to set an Out of Office message. With Teams being utilized so heavily for day-to-day communication (and even replacing some emails), it makes so much sense to use this feature when you’re not around. It also syncs to your Outlook calendar and is very easy to use.
It’s been a while since we had a Word tip for the blog! I recently had to update a report in Dynamics where updates were captured in a Word document, and it was difficult to determine what was updated. I used the compare feature for the first time and found it to be extremely helpful–it merges the two documents and finds all differences. Below, I’ll walk through the steps to compare two documents.
Microsoft is really rolling out some valuable features with Teams, especially for meetings! This one has been out for a while, but I wanted to give it some attention because it’s easy to ignore or forget about. It’s now possible to turn on live captions for your meetings, which increases accessibility and paves the way for the new “Recap” feature that is rolling out. I’ll be doing a separate post about that in the future, but it will include a copy of the meeting transcript, recording, shared documents and any notes left in the chat. I tested out the live caption feature quite a bit this week and it works pretty well–I’d say it correctly captured about 95% of what I said. It even includes punctuation!
If you’re working from home, you’re probably dealing with some sort of background noise–kids, dogs, construction, all of the above… (if this is you, hang in there!) Thankfully, Microsoft released noise suppression settings for Teams in December. Keep reading to learn where to adjust this setting. Read More
For years, a workaround has been required to add group/shared calendars to Microsoft Teams. Microsoft has finally released a feature to add a shared calendar to a channel in Teams. Before you get too excited, though, note that it does not seem to be possible to connect to an existing group calendar like you do in the proposed workaround! You can now, however, add a new calendar shared with the members of a channel. Read More
Imagine you’re sharing your screen, and Teams messages keep popping up. You just know everyone is reading the message previews. No longer! I know many of you have been waiting for this feature for a long time–you can finally turn off message previews in Microsoft Teams. Hooray! Keep reading to view step-by-step instructions. Read More
