Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
This tip is part of my 5-part series: Tips for Navigating and Finding Content in Microsoft Teams. In my last tip, I shared how to improve your use of the “Activity Feed.” You can access this blog post here – Tips for Navigating and Finding Content in Microsoft Teams: Tip 3.
As a reminder, here are the tips I have shared or will be sharing in the future:
- Use the search bar to find messages, files, people, and more
- Use the command box to perform quick actions and access apps
- Use the activity feed to see your notifications and mentions
- Use the Chat view to find key information in your conversations
- Use the Teams view to search for teams and channels
Tip #4. Use the Chat view to find key information in your conversations
The chat tab (I will call it the “chat view” going forward) is located on the left side of the Teams app and shows you all your conversations with people and meetings at your organization. You can use the chat view to see your recent and pinned chats with individuals, groups, or meetings. You can also use the chat tab to start a new chat, make a call, or share your screen. What I find most people forget when using the search filter within chat is the “more filters.”
Use Filters to narrow down your list of chats
This “more filters” is hidden through a series of clicks. First is the three horizontal lines, as pointed out in the first image below.
After selecting these three horizontal lines, you will see a different top bar where you can filter by a person’s name or by chat group names. You can also dive deeper into more options, as the red arrow in the images below illustrate.
All these filtering options can come in handy when accessing a particular chat that does not appear immediately in your default view of your chat history. I am pointing out these additional filters since chat conversations can become key information you might refer to on a busy workday.
Name your chats to add extra clarity to their purpose
If I were to point out two more handy features of Teams’ chat view, they would be the ability to name a group chat and access meeting chats. The first chat highlighted below is a named group chat. I was chatting with a group of individuals to coordinate a team celebration and named that chat group “Q1 2024—Team of the Quarter.” The beauty of naming this chat group is that I am giving context as to why I have this chat group, and then I can later search for all of my “Team of the Quarter” conversations.
The other minor point I am making in the image below is that you can quickly get to chats that occurred during your meetings through the chat view versus navigating to the meeting through the Teams’ Calendar app. Through the chat view, you have a direct way to navigate to the conversation and can get unread messages in the chat view when conversations continue past the end of the meeting. You will find getting an unread message for that meeting quite handy for quick follow-ups or questions after the meeting has concluded.
Conclusion
Key content can be tucked away in a chat message, and I hope these few tips will increase productivity when trying to find a message in your chat view. With one-on-one chats, group chats, and meeting chats all being captured in the chat list under the chat view, I tend to break out some of these tips to get to a key message.
In my next “Tips for Navigating and Finding Content in Microsoft Teams” post (Tip #5), I will delve into the area of Microsoft Teams that I (and probably you) spend most of my time in Teams. This is the Teams app within Microsoft Teams. I wish this was named differently, but that can happen occasionally with Microsoft naming (having overloaded names). It is possible to be a member of 100 teams after a few years of working in Teams. I will share some of my techniques to get around this part of Microsoft Teams and overcome some of the user interface limitations you will experience.
Quick disclaimer: In the world of software as a service, the platform can change daily. If you see that one of my tips needs to be updated, let me know in the comments so I can update it when a change occurs. I always appreciate feedback and discussions in the comments of my posts.
If you are looking for a guide to help you get more out of Microsoft Teams, we are here to help. Click the link below to learn more about how we help organizations have thriving employees through better use of Teams.
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