Today, I want to show you a Microsoft Teams tutorial. What is Microsoft Teams? Well, it has all of your chats, meetings, files, all in one place. In a moment, I will show you exactly what all of that means.
Let’s get started to join this happy group of people and start using Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams Tutorial: Sign in
- Well, first off, your organization needs Microsoft Teams. If your school or workplace does not yet have Microsoft Teams, you can sign up for free. However, chances are you’re just trying to get access to Microsoft Teams, in which case you can simply click on sign in to make it even easier to sign in.
- You could simply head to the Microsoft website and when you go there, that will bring you to the sign in page where you can sign in with your school or workplace account.
- Next, you will likely see a screen that prompts you to download the team’s desktop app.
- The team’s desktop app is more feature rich, and it also has all of the latest and greatest functionality.
- If you’re going to be using Teams a lot, I recommend getting the app. However, you can also use the Web app for the rest of the story. I’m going to be using the desktop app. If you decide to use the web app, you will have most of the core functionality.
- If you want to update to the desktop experience at any time. Click more options (…) in the top-right corner and there’s a download desktop app option. You could simply click on that and then download the desktop app.
- Now that we have Microsoft Teams, I want to take a moment to orient you to the experience. Over on the left hand side is the navigation bar. In a moment, we’re going to go through each one of these to see what they can do.
Teams
- The app itself is called Teams. It’s probably a pretty important one. Now, you might be wondering, what is a team? Well, the simplest way to describe it is that a team is simply a collection of people, content and tools, and they will be based on a project or group.
- But first off, we need to add a new team. To add a new team, at the very bottom, you will see an icon that says join or create a team. Let’s click on that.
- Within, join or create a team. I could create my very own team or I could join an existing team.
- Let’s go ahead and create a new team. Create a new team from scratch or from an existing team. You will see a whole bunch of templates that you can use to start a new team. This will also help you better understand what a team is.
- You can have a team manage a project, or maybe you want another team to onboard new employees for your organization to manage an upcoming event. For this example, we need to onboard some new employees, so I’m going to use the onboarding employees template.
- It will automatically create channels for you. We will see what these different channels are and we will also add some apps to this team.
- You could define whether it’s a private or a public team.
- As a private team, only those people who you invite can participate in your team. If you set it to public, anyone in your organization is able to join. Now, I’m all about transparency, so let’s go with public.
- Next, I need to type in some details about my new team and a description. All of that looks good. I will click on Create now.
- I finished adding my team. On the left hand side, I see my new team in the list. If I click on the ellipsis, I can add members to my team. I could even get a link to the team that could be shared with others. Once the project’s over and I no longer need the team, I can even delete it within my new team.
- I have a set of four different channels and what our channels will be. It allows you to organize according to specific topics and projects.
- With my new employee onboarding, we have a channel where employees can come together and chat.
- I can keep that separate from my training channel, where I’m going to upload all of our training materials.
- Once again, it is simply a way to organize content and conversations. Now that we know the basics of teams and channels.
- Why don’t we jump into the employee chat channel to see if there are any conversations within the employee chat channel? Here at the very bottom, I can kick off a new conversation, but here I see that one of our new employees already posted something, and I can click on reply, which will create a threaded conversation.
- If I really want to get anyone else’s attention, I can type in the @ symbol, and then I could select a person.
- A notification that there is a chat message waiting for it, along with mentioning an individual. I could also type in @ and mention the entire channel. On the user’s screen, we can see an icon indicating that there is a message.
- It’s an easy way to get someone’s attention. As I’m having a conversation with the user, I can also format my text to make it stand out a little bit more.
- I will click on Reply and use all of the different standard formatting tools.
- I’m not just limited to typing text here. I can also drag and drop files over and include a file as part of this conversation to access the file.
- The files tab can be accessed at the top to see all of the different files from across all of the different conversations within the files view.
- You can also create a new document directly from here and upload an existing one.
- Every single channel has its own files tab and it also has its own posts tab.
- Once again, using channels is simply a way to organize different conversations and files to stay on top of the teams and channels that matter to you. You can reorganize teams by simply dragging and dropping.
- Also, if there’s a team that no longer matters to you, you can click on the ellipsis and hide it.
- I want to make sure I stay on top of the employee chat. I can click on that channel, click on the ellipsis, and then I can pin it to the top so I have easy access back to that channel.
Activity
Back over on the navigation bar, on the left hand side, the top icon is for activity. This is where you get notifications about any recent activity from teams, meetings, files or apps. I can also filter all of my activity. If I click on the ellipsis here, I can filter down to specific types of activity.
Chats
- The next icon is for chat and a chat is ideal for communicating and sharing in smaller groups.
- On the top, kick off a new conversation by clicking on the icon.
- I will type a user name and then type my message. Now that I’ve kicked off a chat and I can turn this into a video call. I can also simply set it up as a voice call and share my screen.
- I can add additional people to the conversation and even pop out of the chat.
Calendar
- The next icon is for calendar, where I can review my upcoming calendar. All of this is synced with Outlook.
- If I want to schedule a new meeting, in the top right hand corner, I can click on this icon that says New meeting.
- Within meeting details, type a subject, include participants for the meeting and type a description.
- It’s pretty much the same flow within Microsoft Outlook. Once I’m all done, I can click on the send button.
- This will automatically include a joint link for Microsoft Teams, so we can all meet virtually.
- Now I see the new event on my calendar and when I click on it, I can join the meeting.
- Before joining the meeting, I can configure my video and audio options here.
- I could also turn on different background filters to blur my background.
- I could also go through and configure all of my audio settings and once I’m ready to join, I can simply click on Join now.
- Now that I’m in the meeting, I have a few different options on the top bar.
- I can see the participants and everyone else who’s already in the session. I can have a chat with all of the different participants and raise my hand within the ellipsis. I can also create breakout rooms.
- One of the interesting ones is that I can kick off a recording of this meeting using more options.
- Also, I can share content with all of the participants. I could share my whole desktop a specific window, and access to a whiteboard.
- Once I’m all done with my meeting, I simply click the red button to leave or end the meeting.
Calls
- Back in the navigation pane, there are two more different icons that we’re going to look at.
- The first one is that you could call other people in your organization; you would see a history of all of your calls; you could go through and look at your contacts; and you could even listen to voicemail.
Files
There’s also the file view here. You could see all of your files on one drive and all of the files that you have access to within Microsoft Teams.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope this Microsoft Teams tutorial helps.
Now I’d like to hear from you:
Which finding from today’s report did you find most interesting? Or maybe you have a question about something that I covered.
Either way, I’d like to hear from you. So go ahead and leave a comment below.
