Mastering Microsoft Teams Training Tutorial

In the following lectures within this section, you will examine the elements of the Teams environment. New users should first familiarize themselves with the tools and elements within the program’s environment to best utilize its resources. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

The Activity feed is a record of everything you and your teammates do in Microsoft Teams. It consolidates all the activity from your different chats, calls, channels, and teams into one place. As activity goes on in your channels, a red numbered icon will appear over the app to alert you to activity not yet seen. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can easily customize your profile picture in Microsoft Teams. To add or change your profile picture, click the Profile icon in the upper-right corner of the application. Click the “Change picture” link that appears just below your name. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can set your status in Microsoft Teams to display your availability to other team members and let them know whether you're available to chat, busy in a meeting, or just temporarily away. A dot appears on your profile picture that indicates your current status. Teams automatically sets your status in certain situations, such as when you are idle, in a meeting, or on a call. You can also manually set your availability status. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

A “team” in Microsoft Teams is a group of people connected by a common purpose, such as work or shared interests. Teams allows users to chat, meet, call, and share information to achieve goals. Teams are comprised of channels, which are the places where conversations take place. Channels can be standard and visible to everyone on the team, or they can be private and accessible only by specific team members. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Getting started in Teams is a three-step process. First, create the team. Second, add people to the team. Third, create the channels in which people will meet. To create a new team from scratch, click the “Teams” button in the app bar. At the bottom of the “Teams” pane, click the “Join or create a team” button. Then click the “Create team” button that appears to the right. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

If you are managing multiple teams, you can organize them to best suit your needs. To change the order of your teams in the list, click on a team name and drag it to its new location, then release the mouse. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Each member in Microsoft Teams is assigned one of three roles, each with a specific set of permissions that controls their activity in Teams: Owners, Members, and Guests. You can assign multiple people to each of the three roles. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Teams compartmentalizes information into channels. Channels are dedicated sections of a team where conversations and collaboration happens between team members. Channels contain the conversations, meetings, and files that members of the channel share with one another. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Channels appear in the Teams pane under their associated team, indented and in alphabetical order. While you can reorder teams in the list, you cannot reorder channels. As your channel list grows, you can hide channels no longer relevant or active, rename channels, and delete channels. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Each channel has a unique email address. Sending an email to the channel address inserts the email directly into the channel discussion. There are times when it can be helpful for a team member to send or forward an email to an entire channel. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

A “post” in Teams is a message that is displayed in a channel conversation on its “Posts” tab. A post can consist of standard or formatted text, file attachments, emojis, gifs, stickers, and more. Posts are displayed in chronological order, with the most recent at the bottom of the content window of the “Posts” tab in the channel. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

An announcement in Teams is a post that is highlighted with a banner which adds visual interest and helps make the post stand out in the channel. Announcements can include a main headline as well as a subheading, along with the option to apply a background color or image. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can send a co-worker or an entire team a notification to get their attention by mentioning them in a post by using the @mention feature. You can also use @mentions to alert members of a subset of a team to whom you have applied a tag, which we will look at in an upcoming lecture. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can cross-post to multiple channels to share information with multiple teams simultaneously. Click the “New conversation” button, click into the Compose Message box, and start a new message. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Tags are identifiers that you can assign to one or multiple members to easily communicate with a subset of people in a standard channel. Anyone on the team can then use the tag in @Mentions or to start a new conversation with those that have been assigned the tag. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

To delete your previous posts and/or messages in Teams, click to select the post’s chat or channel. Then hover over the message or post to edit or delete and click the “More options” ellipsis. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

As activity occurs in Teams, a red numbered icon appears over the buttons in the app bar where new activity exists you haven’t read yet. To read a new chat message, click the “Chat” button in the app bar, then select the chat to view its contents to the right. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

A helpful feature of Microsoft Teams is the ability to easily share files with other team members in a collaborative environment. Within each Team, there are one or more channels. When a channel is created, a corresponding folder is also created in SharePoint that stores the channel’s content. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can sync the SharePoint folders for the files for channels and teams in Teams to a local folder on your computer by using OneDrive, so you can access and edit local copies of these files, even offline. Since you sync to the folders when you connect online, changes you or others make to the files in these folders update automatically. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

In Microsoft Teams, members can simultaneously work on Microsoft 365 files, like Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations. If they choose to edit the Microsoft 365 file in Teams, then they can also carry on a conversation in Teams while collaborating. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Chat is at the heart of everything you do in Teams. As a communication and collaboration hub, the ability to quickly and easily contact other team members is a critical function. The conversation that happens in a channel on the “Posts” tab is essentially one big chat, where all channel members have access to view content and participate. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can filter chats to more easily find them in the list. To filter chats, click the “Chat” button in the app bar and click the “Filter” icon at the top of the Chat pane. Type the name of a person in the chat you are trying to locate in the “Filter by name” field at the top of the pane. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can add contacts to your Contacts list in Teams to easily find, call, and message team members and people outside your organization. Note that you cannot call external phone numbers for contacts without having a phone plan for your Office subscription. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can add any contact to your speed dial list in Teams. Contacts in your speed dial list appear before anyone else under the default “Speed Dial” contact group in the “Calls” view in Teams, making it even easier to find someone, check their availability, if possible, and then call them. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can make one-on-one or group video or audio calls with other team members in a few different ways. To make a call from within a chat, click the “Video call” or “Audio call” button in the upper-right corner of the chat window. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

When you have an incoming call, a notification appears onscreen indicating the source of the call. To answer the call, click the “Accept with video” or “Accept with audio” button in the notification. Which buttons are available depends on the source of the call. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

To configure your voicemail, click your profile icon in the upper-right corner of the Teams application and select “Settings” from the menu that appears. Select the “Calls” category on the left side of the “Settings” window. In the “Calls” window, you can determine how incoming calls should be handled in the “Call answering rules” section. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can see your call history by clicking the “Calls” button in the app bar and then selecting “History” in the Calls pane to the right. Calls are listed in chronological order in the content window to the right, with the most recent call at the top. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

If you have an Enterprise Voice or Business Voice license in Teams, you can assign a delegate to take your calls or make calls on your behalf when you are away. Setting up a delegate in Teams to take your calls is a two-part process. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Your calendar in Teams is automatically connected to your Microsoft Exchange calendar. When you schedule a meeting in Teams or Outlook, the calendars will sync with each other and the meeting will appear in both calendars. There are a few different ways to open the “New Meeting” window to begin the process of scheduling a meeting. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

When you want to have an impromptu meeting or if you don’t have meeting scheduling capabilities, you can use the “Meet now” feature, which can be accessed via your calendar or from a channel conversation. You can click the “Calendar” button in the app bar and then click the “Meet now” button in the upper-right corner of the Calendar window. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Your organization’s Teams IT admin sets the meeting options and participant defaults for your organization. However, as a meeting organizer, you may want or need to change them for a specific meeting. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

To view your appointments and meetings for the day or week, click the “Calendar” button in the app bar. Near the top of the Calendar window is the Calendar Navigation bar. You can change the Calendar view to see a single day, a work week, or an entire calendar week by clicking the “Calendar View” drop-down at the right end of the Calendar Navigation bar and making a selection. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

There are a few different ways to join a meeting in Teams. How you join will depend on who created the meeting, where the meeting is taking place, whether or not you have a Teams account, and how the meeting details were communicated to you. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

You can change what appears behind you in a video meeting by replacing the background. When you are adjusting your audio and visual settings before a meeting begins, click the “Background effects” button next to the “Camera” and “Microphone” buttons. In the “Background settings” pane that opens, scroll through the background choices and click to select your desired background. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

In Microsoft Teams, you can share your screen so that other participants can view your desktop, a specific application, file, presentation, or other activity while you are in a meeting or video call. To share your screen, click the “Share content” button in the Meeting Controls toolbar. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

In addition to sharing your screen during a Teams meeting, you can also share a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, which will grant special permissions to the other attendees. They will be able to navigate to different slides in the presentation without interrupting the main presentation. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

If you have the proper Microsoft 365 subscription and your Admin has enabled recording for your team, then you can record any Teams meeting to capture audio, video, and screen sharing. People from another organization or company, guest users, and anonymous users cannot record meetings or calls. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

If you want to contribute during a Teams meeting without interrupting, you can raise your hand virtually. Click the “Raise your hand” button in the Meeting Controls toolbar. All meeting participants will be able to see that you have raised your hand. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

“Meeting Notes” in Microsoft Teams provides a place for meeting participants to capture and share notes during and after a meeting. In order to start or access Meeting Notes, a user must be a member of the same organization as the meeting organizer. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Meeting participants can turn on live captions in Teams to make the meeting more inclusive for them if they are deaf, hard of hearing, have a language barrier, or are participating in a place that is hard for them to hear the other participants. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

If you are the meeting organizer, you can end a Teams meeting for all participants. Some teachers find this helpful to make sure students aren’t lingering in virtual classrooms after the teacher has left to supervise. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Microsoft Teams Live Events is a feature that broadcasts video and meeting content to large online audiences. Live Events differ from meetings in that live events are intended to present content in a one-to-many format, where a host leads and presents content the audience consumes, while meetings are designed for more collaborative work, screen sharing, and attendee interaction. Live Events is a great option for events such as town halls and product launches. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Producers of a live event manage the event and can also present. They can start and stop the event, control what is shared, and can also perform all presenter duties. Presenters present at the live event and can moderate Q&A sessions, share audio, video, and their screen to the audience. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

When a live event is created with Q&A enabled, attendees can ask questions and interact with producers and presenters. Attendees can ask questions even if the event hasn’t yet started. Questions are only visible to moderators until they publish them to the event. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

As an attendee, you can watch a Teams Live Event live or on demand if it’s made available. To join a live event as an attendee, click the event link in the event’s invitation. In the web page that opens, select to either join the live event anonymously on the web or download the desktop app. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Apps in Microsoft Teams can expand its functionality by incorporating files, tools, dashboards, and more from other analytics, education, scheduling, productivity, and project management software. Using apps in Teams improves workflow and efficiency by giving team members access to a variety of different resources from a single workspace. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

Once a file has been uploaded to Teams, you can turn it into a tab in a channel or chat conversation to allow for quick and easy access by team members. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

The Wiki tab is a text editor which works like meeting notes. It lets team members draft, edit, chat, and collaborate in a single place. Every channel comes with a Wiki tab automatically included. However, you can also add additional Wiki tabs to a channel. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

The Command Box runs along the top of the Teams app. You use the Command Box in Teams to search, take quick actions, and launch apps. To use the Command Box to search, click into it and type what to find, like a person, channel, or a message. Then select it from the resulting list to jump directly to the search result. Learn about this and more during this lecture.

This lecture provides a brief summary of the topics covered throughout the course. Plus, practice exercises and keyboard shortcuts located in the PDF manual.