One of the newer 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 set up — keep reading to learn more.
Microsoft Teams recently added the ability to mirror your video during meetings. This is particularly useful if you are ever trying to show notes or sketches on your camera — see below for a demo! Read More
This tip is more of a cautionary tale to fellow Microsoft Flow (aka Power Automate) users. Do you have Flows that are important, but rarely used? Did you know that flows will turn off automatically if they haven’t been triggered in 90 days? Of course, you can pay specifically for a standalone Power Automate plan to avoid this, or you can keep reading for a cheaper workaround.
If you ever need to go back and see how long a Microsoft Teams meeting was (perhaps for invoicing or time tracking), it’s easy to do! You just have to know where to look. Read More
A recent update from Microsoft has refreshed the look for most desktop apps, including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. You can now easily change the theme in any of these apps to either match your current Windows theme or choose a custom theme. Read More
Microsoft recently added the ability to respond directly to specific chat messages within chats. This can be immensely helpful for all participants if there are multiple messages to respond to! To see chat replies in action, keep reading.
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.
If you’ve ever needed to find out when you wrote something in OneNote, this tip is for you. It is ridiculously easy to find the timestamp, but you may have never noticed it! This feature works in both OneNote 2016 and the OneNote App for Windows 10.
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.
