The Office 365 Expert: My Best Tips in Teams

With more and more people working from home, we want to share our experiences with working outside the office. In this blog post, you will find some helpful tips on working in Teams, from Office 365 expert Jenny Oredsson Lind. We hope that Jenny's advice will help you work efficiently remotely.

My best tips in Teams:

Download the desktop app

Although you can use the web version of Teams, the desktop app is usually more stable. With it, you will get notifications automatically, which you can easily overlook if you forget to open Teams in the browser. In addition, the Team's web version works slightly differently depending on the browser, e.g. IE 11 does not support video.

Open files that you work with, in the desktop app or open the menu at the top

If you just click on a file, it opens in Teams and even if you can edit a lot in this mode, it is usually easier to edit in Office Word, Excel or PowerPoint. When you close the file in Teams, you are also redirected back to the "General" tab and then you have to navigate back into the structure if you are working with documents that are in a certain folder. It's easy to lose yourself.

Start a direct chat in the command bar

Start by writing @ and you will see a list of the contacts you can write to in Teams.

Set notifications

You can set up so that you receive a notification when a contact is available, e.g. if you want to keep track of when your colleagues are coming back from break.

Hide the background of video meetings

If you are at home and have video meetings, you may not want to show what it looks like in the background where you are sitting. By clicking "..." in the video meeting you can choose to set the blurry background. Then only you are the focus and the background is blurred.

Quick commands and help in Teams

Enter "/ help" in the Teams command bar and you will be navigated to more information and help about Teams. Or just start by writing "/" to show the Teams help.

Problems adding apps?

Have you read about all the useful apps you can add to Teams, but when you look for these apps they are not there? This may be due to the fact that at the organizational level, apps are not allowed. Contact your IT department if you can add new apps.