Microsoft Teams (2026) in 3 Hours: Boost Your Productivity

Create a team from scratch or from a template, choose private or public settings, and add members; set up marketing as private and trade show as public.

Add members in Microsoft Teams using add member or manage team, assign member or owner roles, invite within your organization, and understand ownership across teams.

Explore the differences between owner, member, and guest roles in Microsoft Teams, including who can change settings, manage members, collaborate on files, and external guests with a Microsoft account.

Navigate team settings, manage pending requests, adjust privacy between private and public, and explore channels, analytics, apps, and tags for effective collaboration.

Discover how to invite guests to a Microsoft Teams team by adding external members with their email address, see the guest label, and set permissions for secure collaboration.

Learn how to join existing teams in your organization, distinguishing public from private teams, using a public join, a join code, a join link with approval, or a direct invitation.

Learn how to manage teams in Microsoft Teams by hiding, showing, and reordering them, and how to leave or delete private or public teams.

Participate in a hands-on exercise to create at least one private and one public team in Microsoft Teams, and practice adding members or guests, noting public vs private differences.

Add and manage channels within a team in Microsoft Teams, including standard, private, and shared types. The default general channel cannot be deleted, and owners invite members and control visibility.

Hide and show channels to reduce clutter, delete or leave channels (when you're the owner), and pin favorite channels to the top for quick access, with private channels requiring invites.

Brainstorm and create Microsoft Teams channels for a trade show team, set up at least one public and one private team, and explore channel ideas for this context.

Create a Microsoft Teams workspace with general, admin, budget private, catering, and logistics channels, decide private vs public access, invite only relevant people, and follow alphabetical ordering.

Create posts with a subject and text, format options, mark important, decide who can reply, and post in this or multiple channels to support threaded conversations.

Learn advanced post options in Microsoft Teams, including attachments, emojis, gifs, stickers, and loop components, with a focus on the interactive voting table for real-time inline editing.

Explore post types in Microsoft Teams, switch to announcements, set only owners can post, and use one-way channel communication for impactful updates.

Learn how to mention people and channels with the at symbol in Microsoft Teams. Manage notifications via the activity center and direct conversations to the right participants.

Edit your own messages and delete posts in a Teams channel, with edits visible to everyone and an undo option; channel or company settings may restrict these actions.

Explore quick responses with emojis and reactions to acknowledge posts, and learn how pinning messages works for all channel members, including the green pin indicator.

Create posts in a team or channel in Microsoft Teams to practice posting basics, including a normal post and an announcement, and explore loop component, mentions, formatting, and quick actions.

Navigate chats and channels in Microsoft Teams, learning the difference between public channel conversations and private one-on-one or group chats, and how to start and manage them.

Create a group chat with multiple people, including external contacts, and name the group, and set a profile picture. Manage participants by viewing, removing, and adding members, or leave chat.

Manage chats in Microsoft Teams by marking unread, pinning/unpinning, filtering by name, muting, hiding, deleting, showing hidden chat history, and opening chats in a new window for multi-monitor setups.

Learn how Teams automatically and manually manages your online status—from available and busy to do not disturb and away—and how to control notifications while setting today's work location.

Learn how to set and customize status messages in Microsoft Teams, use automatic replies, mention colleagues, and sync out-of-office settings with Outlook.

Practice using chats, set availability, and statuses in Microsoft Teams by creating group chats and testing chat features, adding a status message.

Master starting audio and video calls from a chat in teams, switch between call modes, mute, share your screen, and invite more participants.

Plan meetings in teams by scheduling a meeting with attendees and an agenda. Use the scheduling assistant to find a suitable time and set online or offline options.

Learn to invite external participants, update meetings, and manage options like chat, attendance, breakout rooms, Q&A, and lobby controls in Microsoft Teams.

Master basic meeting settings in Microsoft Teams, including joining as organizer or presenter, camera and audio options, chat, raise hand, reactions, and gallery or speaker view.

Master screen sharing in Microsoft Teams by choosing full screen or a window, with optional system sound. Use Microsoft Whiteboard for real-time collaboration with templates and automatic saving.

Explore PowerPoint live and Excel live in Microsoft Teams to share presentations and collaborate in real time, with presenter notes, private view, on-the-fly translation, and live co-editing.

Create and manage breakout rooms to split large meetings into smaller groups, with automatic or manual assignment, renaming, opening and closing, and returning participants to the main meeting.

Start a meeting recording as the organizer, inform participants, and stop recording when done. Watch the recording in stream, share within the organization for up to 120 days.

Practice meeting features and settings by starting a video call from chat or planning a meeting, then explore screen sharing, PowerPoint, live X, whiteboard, rooms, mute, and camera switch.

Store and share files in Microsoft Teams by uploading from your device or linking cloud files, keeping everything in one place and organized in chats or channels.

Organize files in a channel view by creating folders, color-coding, and dragging files into folders in the online marketing channel; store documents in SharePoint to ensure changes affect everyone.

Compare uploads with cloud files from OneDrive, and learn how to attach and share. Identify permissions including edit, view, and download, and settings like organization scope, expiration dates, and passwords.

Edit office files directly in Teams by opening in Teams, the Word desktop app, or a browser, with automatic save, version history, and in-app comments for collaboration.

Upload local and cloud files to a channel, compare sharing options, organize with folders and colors, and edit Word, PowerPoint, or Excel in Teams while collaborating to track changes.

Master Microsoft Teams search to quickly find messages, files, and people across chats and channels. Use the Ctrl+E shortcut, view top hits, and filter results for fast access.

Master quick actions in the search bar using slash commands to set status or chat, and install apps like YouTube to search, browse, and share content.

Explore key Microsoft Teams settings to tailor general options, notifications, appearance, files, chats, and devices, including turning off email alerts, using browser for files, and enabling a secondary ringer.