Teams has matured quite significantly from its release date back in 2016. Throughout those years I’ve come across many features that I’ve found essential for work, so I’ve compiled a list of the top ten Teams tips (wow that’s a tongue twister) that you can use to get the most out of Teams!
Send an email to a channel
Many people may not know this, but each channel in Teams has its own email address. Let’s say you’re in Outlook and you receive an e-mail that you wish had been communicated in Teams instead. No need to worry, you can send an email to your channel in Teams simply by going to the channel name and clicking More options ‘…’ > Get email address. You can also reply to an email in a channel and even view the original email if the email sent to the channel is too large to view in the conversation.
Use commands in the search bar
Another hidden feature that you may not be aware of is the use of commands which are basically shortcuts that you can use to perform common tasks in Teams! Want to see your recent files? Just type in /files in the search bar.
Need some help with Teams? Just type /help and you’ll be directed to the help topics, training, and news for Microsoft Teams!
These are just a couple of the commands, but you can get the entire list here or just simply type the “/“in your search bar.
Add tags to your team
Looking for a quick way to reach a group of people within a team? Look no further, tags will let you do just that! Tags allow you to categorize people based on attributes, like a role, project, skill, etc. For example, let’s say you wanted to reach all Nurses in a team, you could easily create a tag for “Nurses” and add all nurses to that tag. Once the tag has been created just @mention it in a channel and everyone that has been assigned to that tag will receive a notification.
To create your tags just select Teams 
on the left side of the app and find your team in the list. Then select More options 
and choose Manage tags 
. This is where you will create your tag name and add the people you want to be associated with this tag.
Once created just @mention the tag name you created and you’re all set!
Additionally, you can start a chat with members of a tag by selecting New chat and typing in the name of the tag. Everyone in that tag group will be added to the To: field. I think it is safe to say that the days of @mentioning each person one by one are gone!
Pop-out your chats
One of my favorite additions to Microsoft Teams is the ability to pop out a chat in Teams. Teams now allows you to pop out your one-to-one or group chats into a separate window. After you pop it out you can resize it, reposition it, or close the window as you wish. For all you multi-taskers out there, this is one feature you can’t live without! You can check out all of the different ways to pop out a chat here.
Open multiple instances of Teams
At times, you may find yourself jumping around between multiple conversations, teams, channels, or even accounts (if you’re using guest access). Although pop out chats can help combat this to some degree, it still leaves a gap in your multitasking endeavors. One of the easiest workarounds is opening a browser and navigating to teams.microsoft.com. Now you can run your desktop application and the browser-based client at once! We can make this process even quicker though by adding the website as an app in your browser. For example, open Edge Chromium and navigate to teams.microsoft.com. Once there, all you’ll need to do is go to the ellipses (three dots) on the upper right-hand corner of your browser and then go down to Apps > Install this site as an app.
Once you’ve chosen to install the site as an app, you’ll see a popup where you’ll be able to name the app. In the screenshot below, you’ll notice that I’ve just named mine Microsoft Teams Edge Chromium. Then select Install.
After the app has been installed you’ll notice that you have an additional Teams icon in your taskbar. With the Edge Chromium Browser, it will automatically pin the app to the taskbar.
If you a Chrome user, no need to worry, I’ve got you covered. I have instructions on how to install Teams as an app in Chrome here.
Save an important message for later
Do you have a really important message that you need to remember to read again later? No need to worry, you can easily mark a message as saved or unread so you can come back to it at a later time. You can do this by going to the top of the message that you want to save/mark as unread and select More Options “…” > Save this message or Mark as unread. If you’ve saved the message you can access it at any time by selecting your profile picture in the upper right-hand corner of your client and then choose Saved.
@Mention a user, team, or channel
Need to get someone’s attention in a channel conversation or chat? You can @mention them by typing “@” and then their name (no spaces). What if you need to get the attention of the entire team? Easy, just type in @team, select the team, and then type out your message. If you just want to @mention a particular channel within the team you can do that as well by typing @channel, selecting the channel name, and then typing out your message.
