Learning new Microsoft Office tricks in "just a minute"
If you spend most of your day in Microsoft Teams, you know how difficult it is to bounce back and forth between various teams, apps, tabs, and so forth. If you have to go to a new workspace, you then have to try and figure out where you were before. Microsoft has now made it easier to get back and forth between areas by giving you a History Menu in the upper-left corner of the Teams client, much like the forward and backward buttons in a browser. Here’s how it works…
It used to be that when you were disconnected from the internet, any messages you tried to send in Microsoft Teams would end up giving you a failure message. You could retry, but if you’re disconnected, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Now, Microsoft Teams will queue up those unsent messages for 24 hours, meaning you can continue to work and respond to messages even though you’re disconnected. Here’s how that works…
Now that many of us are working from home and attending seemingly endless online meetings, the issue of background noise has become a common battle. Dogs, voices, kids, and various other sounds make it into the meeting, and it’s often hard to filter it out short of going on mute. Now Microsoft Teams has a Noise Suppression setting that you can use to have a more automated approach to suppressing your background noise. Here’s how it works…
I’ll admit it… I get frustrated when someone is running a meeting, the ending time is quickly approaching, and they seem oblivious to the clock. Microsoft Teams meetings now help address that a bit by providing End Of Meeting Notifications at the five minute mark. Here’s how it works…
One of the important things to do when you join a Microsoft Teams meeting is make sure your video and audio options are set properly based on your current environment. It used to be that you’d have to join the meeting first, and then look for the options to fix everything (like muting yourself or turning on your video). Now there’s a new pre-meeting joining experience to let you set those before you enter the meeting. Here’s how it works…
There are a number of places where you end up storing tasks and to-do items throughout Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams has made it a bit easier to keep track of your items with a feature called Tasks by Planner and To Do. This consolidates your To Do tasks and your Planner tasks in one place for easy reference. Here’s how it works…
One frustration I’ve had with Microsoft Teams is that it has a tendency to change my status from Busy (or whatever I have it set to) to Away if I’m not interacting with Teams every five minutes. I would prefer that Teams either leaves my status as I set it, or at least gave me the ability to set some time frame longer than five minutes. And now my wish came true! Teams now allows you to set a duration for your status. Here’s how it works…
One thing that has been missing from Microsoft Teams meetings is the ability to download a list of people who were on the call. That option is now available for the owner of the meeting so long as they download it before they leave the meeting. Here’s how that works…
Have you ever been in a situation where someone is looking over your shoulder at your screen, and a chat notification shows up with a message preview you’d have preferred not been seen? Same thing with sharing your screen (and not being in Do Not Disturb mode), and someone sends you “commentary” on someone in the meeting?
Awkward…
Now you can turn off the message preview function in Microsoft Teams chat notifications. Here’s how that works…
