Turbocharging Teams - Episode 10: Taking More Command of Teams

By Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams focuses on tips and tricks to help you get the most out of using Microsoft Teams. The Command Bar in Teams allows you to more quickly get some common things done. In this episode of Turbocharging Teams, Kevin and Dino continue to explore the command bar and some of their favorite commands that can make you into a more efficient Teams guru.

 

 

Microsoft Stream Generated Automatic Transcript

 

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of turbocharging

teams. I'm Dino Caputo and I'm joined by my colleague Kevin

Kieller. And today we're going to continue speaking about the

command bar, AKA the search bar.

So just a quick recap, the search bar, which is also known

as the command bar, is where you can enter some quick commands to

execute on a bunch of different things within teams, and we've

show you a few of the commands listed below here on this slide.

There's at this point there's.

About 21 different commands that you can execute within the

search bar, so we're going to go through a few more of them as we

did in our last episode.

So First off, this / FIND command.

The Find command is an interesting one because it lets you scope

your searches to either channel or chat conversations. So if I

do a slash find as indicated in notation one, you can see that

it pre populates channel or chat and then type a word. So teams

are saying hey do you want to find something? Do you want to

look in a channel or a chat for what you're looking for? So in

this case I'm going to do search for the word find and

turbocharging teams. As you can see in notation 2.

And you can see that it returns the results an you know I've had

a few conversations with Kevin where I used the word find was

used in that conversation so you can see those listed in the left

hand pane. So that's a neat way to just quickly find words in

teams within a channel.

And so the next Next up would be looking for words that you may

have spoken in a chat. So this case I'm looking, I'm going to

search in chats with that iPad with Kevin for the word status

and again the results. There's three results that are listed

here and where Kevin. I've had conversations with the word

status in there, and I can click on any of those conversations

that it'll quickly take me to those conversations in the right

hand pane. So great way to use the slash fine command to look

for. Words in channels or chats.

I like that you use the find command to find find it's like

self reverential. You can also search for other words other

than find yes. Yeah I thought that might be confusing but we

we had just been talking about.. Find the find command. So I just

thought I'll just search for find there you go very good.

Just trying to be clever.

Next up is the slash activity command and this one is to

search for specific users activities and team. So this is

really a simple one. I'd like to see what someone's been up to in

teams lately. Interested in following them or just making

sure that Kevin is doing what he's supposed to be doing so.

I hit slash activity or type slash activity and then it's

prompting for a person and you'll get a drop down of a few

of the most commonly accessed people that have been chatting

with. So you can start typing and see the dropdown. You can

select it. In this case I'll select Kevin once again and.

Very quickly, teams will List. A bunch of different

activities that Kevin's been up to. And once again I can

select them from the list. It generally will be. It'll

return chat conversations that. Kevin sad or posts within

channels and once again selecting those will take you

to those conversations or or chat messages within teams. So

another need need command slash activity.

So Next up we have this slash chat command which allows you to

quickly send a message, a one to one message to someone within

teams. So in this case I say slash chat and then it's

prompting me for a person I'm going to select Kevin again and

I'm going to say good evening and that'll quickly send a

message to Kevin.

So again, I don't have to, you know if I'm just in the search

bar, I want to send a quick one off 1 to one chat message to

somebody you can just use the slot chat, select their name or

type their name an enter the message and it will send them

the message. You can see enter to if you want to actually then.

Take care, have it take you to that chat just and enter as you

can see in notation three and will. It will take you to the

actual chat if you want to continue it, but sometimes you

just might want to send a quick message to someone, so that's

an efficient way to do it as well. It should be mentioned

that you can use the slash chat to talk to Federated Contacts

or gas, so that's kind of neat.. It's not limited to just people

within your own tenant.

Yeah, and also you send me this this message yesterday evening

when you're working on your slides see here. It was like

9:30. I thought you were just being friendly but now I see

that you are just. It was for selfish reasons. Yes yeah

exactly because you know OK?

And I think now I'm taking over with talking about some

additional commands so.

I'm going to talk first about slash files, so you type slash

files and as shown on #1.

It shows as the Down Arrow where. I've got the number 2. It shows

the files that you've recently worked with in kind of

descending order chronological order, so you see that when I

did this screenshot, I was just finishing up my slides and so

this power point deck that we're using I had just been working

on, and then there was some other files going back in time.

If there's lots of files, then you can seem I show by #3. You

can filter by typing in a partial name, so I typed Inter

and it's. It's now then restricting the list to anything

that included that, so it's pulling up all the different

turbocharging teams, slide decks that we've used. One thing to

note there is. This matches anywhere in the file name, so

if, for instance, you were.

Interested you said, Oh, I know there's an Excel file that I've

been working on. If you type in dot XLS it will find all the

things that have that in the file name and so therefore that

with that file extension or if I typed in meetings it would find

you know, for example, that turbocharging teams 16 where we

talked about meetings. It would find that because it's, you know

it doesn't match anywhere in the file name, so that is good to

figure out. If you say, man.

Where was that file? I was just working on it yesterday. The

slash files command will help you out and then on the next

slide the / GOTO

So, especially if you've got lots of

teams, and lots of channels and you can't remember where they

are. I mean the list along kind of your teams along the left

hand side it can belong to try to Scroll down, but you can get

there quickly by doing slash go to or even.

Quicker control G is the keyboard shortcut for that now.

It displays an ordered sort of list. It's kind of ordered,

sort of the same as your teams list, and the reason that I say

sort of is I thought it was the same, but then I started moving

things around and.

As shown in #2 it, it shows first some of the teams, but

then it just seems to kind of pick a random. I don't know if

it's like recently visited or whatever, but you can see that

where it says where the arrow is by #2, that's saying that's the

turbocharging teams channel in the enable UC team, but we've

got lots of other channels and

so, like. The next one down, for example, is that he seed 2020

channel inside of a team that I created called thought so it and

it doesn't display like there's no scrollbar, so it just picks

some of the top ones. Now that seems limiting except as shown

by #3. If you have an idea of what it's called like I was,

let's say I created this.

Pet pics when I wrote an article but how to post your

pet pictures to to teams at this very important?

You can just type in like after the go to command. You can just

type in anything. So I typed in. PET and once again this matches

anywhere. So you can see it makes sense that it comes up

with the pet pics which is inside channel inside of a test

team. So it's matching the channel name but then the one

below is less obvious, but you can see in competition it does

match the PT that's in the word competition, so that's the

channel inside trivia engine for

teams. Team that we have so slash go to, especially

important when you've got lots of teams, lots of channels and

they may have very similar names, so that's another quick

one.

 And then, this is I'm going to say that this is what

I'm going to call the “narcissism” command. This is the

narcissism could be like / NARCISSISM. Maybe we should

suggest that, but you don't do that. You say / MENTIONS and

it shows you all of your mentions once again in

descending date order, meaning the most recent is at the top.

So here's some mentions of few people mentioned me, so it makes

me feel good.

Well, I don't know. Good thing depends what they mentioned

about it. But the other thing is when you do this it also so it

displays this and then you can further filter using the

standard kind of feed filtering capability. But it also

navigates you to the thread with the most recent mention as part

of that. So if people are talking about you weather saying

good things, bad things, the slash mentions command is your

friend. And with that.