Best 10 Microsoft Teams Features

Microsoft Teams is used by more than 15 million users and around 1300 users connect to Teams call every second. The pandemic effect of 2021 and 2022 has led to its sudden growth for connecting people virtually on remote work and meetings. The engagement of the application and number of active users on Teams is simply incredible and reaching the sky limit. It is the best replacement for Skype for business and you can enjoy incredible features in it. Few notable Microsoft Teams features and benefits include group chat, video/voice call, screen share options, mega meetings, online classrooms, and a lot more. Being a part of the Microsoft 365 environment, Microsoft Teams meeting features combines the role of Outlook, SharePoint, and other Microsoft applications. In simple words, you can enjoy a ton of Microsoft Teams features and benefits from which the best collections of them are listed below. Hope this article helps you a lot!

Best 10 Microsoft Teams Features

In this section, we have compiled a list of Microsoft Teams meeting features that are hidden into your minds all these days. Read and share these with your friends who find them useful.

1. Share Email in Teams

Sometimes, there may be a need to copy contents from your Outlook mail and paste it into Teams chat. Copy and Paste would be a great choice preferred by many of you. Yet, this is unnecessary since the Microsoft Teams feature of sharing mail to Teams will be incredibly helpful. A built-in feature between Outlook and Teams lets you do this.

• This Microsoft Teams feature will be helpful to those organizations that deal with external customers, vendors, peers, and a lot more.
• You can send all those emails to a single Teams Channel and this avoids false-mistaken replies and keep mails clean.
• To share Outlook mails to Teams, you must have an Outlook add-in. This add-in is automatically installed on your PC for Teams users. Make a note that, this feature is not supported for mobile Teams users.

Follow these steps to share emails with Teams.

1. If you are using a desktop application, you can simply click on the Share to Teams button in the toolbar ribbon and if you are using a web application, click on the More actions … icon at the top right corner of the mail.

2. Here, type the name of a person, group, or channel you want to share the mail.

If you have any attachments in the mail, they are automatically included when you send them to Teams. If you want to remove them, you can uncheck the Include attachments option. Enjoy sending mails to Teams directly without using the normal conventional method.

2. Use Breakout Rooms

Make a note that, this Microsoft Teams feature is available only for meeting organizers of desktop app users (Microsoft and Mac). You cannot use this feature when you have more than 300 people in the meeting and when you create Teams Breakout Rooms before meetings, you cannot add more than 300 people.

• When you are in a Breakout room, you cannot add people to the meeting from the participant’s panel, cannot add additional people to the chat, cannot use the Call me feature, and cannot copy the Join meeting contents. Otherwise, you can enjoy all other features of chatting and exchanging information.
• You can create Teams Breakout Rooms when you are initiating a meeting or in the middle of your meeting to allow a smaller group of participants to discuss and collaborate.
• You can create around 50 Teams Breakout Rooms for a single meeting. Thus, you can split users in meeting under several groups to discuss any specific/ general content of the meeting.

If you are the organizer/ presenter of the meeting, you can create Breakout Rooms in Teams by following the below-mentioned steps.

1. As usual, create a meeting invite and start the meeting.

2. Now, click on the Breakout rooms option as highlighted below.

3. In the next window, you can choose the number of rooms you want to create from the drop-down menu, and finally, click on Create rooms as shown.

After creating Breakout rooms, you can rename them and manually or automatically assign participants to them. That’s it. As a Breakout Room manager, you can add and delete rooms, manage participants in the room, join any rooms, exit, and open rooms, assign time limits for rooms, send announcements, and recreate rooms if necessary. If you cannot manage Breakout rooms, you can also assign a participant or presenter to manage the same.

Also Read: How to Use Microsoft Teams Secret Emoticons

3. Virtual Whiteboard

Microsoft Teams has an association with Microsoft Whiteboard through which you can share your opinion by drawing, writing, and sketching together in a meeting. This Whiteboard collaboration is available to all participants in the meeting. To use Whiteboard in Teams meet, ensure you have Microsoft Whiteboard on your device.

You can write by dragging a letter, adding text, adding a note, can add a Library image, Bing image, or Camera image, pasting a document, adding a PDF/Word/PowerPoint document, and a lot more features that will amuse you a lot. You can make your Whiteboard visible to all the participants by following the below-mentioned steps.

1. After launching or joining a meeting, click on the Open share tray icon as shown below.

2. Now, on the right side, click on Microsoft Whiteboard as depicted.

Now, Microsoft Whiteboard loads on the screen, and once done, the screen appears as shown below.

Now, the participants of the meeting can enjoy inking their thoughts using this amazing Microsoft Teams feature. Attendees who belong to the same tenant can enjoy collaborating on Whiteboard whereas strangers, federated, or anonymous users cannot do so. Make a note that, when you use Whiteboard for sharing the content in a Teams meeting that is being recorded, this will not be part of the recording. This feature is in the developmental stage and Microsoft will announce you as soon as the changes are successful.

The interesting feature is that the Microsoft Whiteboard feature is available for all the participants in the meeting chat, even after the meeting has ended.

4. Live Transcription in Meetings

When you are in Teams meeting, you can see live transcriptions of the content in the form of text that appear alongside the same meeting screen. This is one of the best Microsoft Teams features and benefits from which users who are deaf or have difficulties in hearing or who have language barriers. Also, if you are attending a meeting that has too much noise, this feature will be much useful. Live transcription in meetings is available only for the desktop version of Teams.

To enable Live transcription in Teams meetings, follow the below-mentioned steps.

1. Join the meeting and click on the More actions icon as shown below.

2. Now, select the Start transcription option from the drop-down list as shown above.

Then, all the participants in the meeting will receive a notification that the contents of the meeting are being transcript. You can also change the language of transcription and make a note that, when you change the language, it affects all users.

You can switch the transcription language as listed below.

English (US), English (Canada), English (India), English (UK), English (Australia), English (New Zealand), Arabic (Arab Emirates) (Preview), Arabic (Saudi Arabia) (Preview), Chinese (Cantonese), Chinese (Mandarin), Danish, Dutch (Belgium) (Preview), Dutch (Netherlands), French (Canada), French (France), Finnish (Preview), German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean (Preview), Norwegian, Polish (Preview), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian (Preview), Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), Swedish.

Also Read: How to Enable or Disable Microsoft Teams Push to Talk

5. Slash Commands

How long you have been using Teams? Did you know slash(/) commands could simplify your productivity and engagement with the app?

Yes. You can switch to your favorite channel, change your status, search for the recent message or navigate to saved messages using Slash commands.

Navigate to the Search bar and type / in it. A list of recommended commands will be shown as follows.

Here are a few most commonly used commands in Teams.

Make use of these interesting commands and tweak Teams settings within a second.

6. Spotlighting People

In Teams, you can spotlight any particular videos to highlight them among all the wide scale of participants. If you are the meeting host or presenter, you can spotlight around 7 users in the meeting. You cannot spotlight people if you have enabled Large gallery or Together mode view. Here are a few instructions to spotlight people in Microsoft Teams meetings.

1. Join the meeting and head towards the Participants list.

2. Now, right-click on the user’s name whom you want to spotlight and select the Spotlight for everyone option as shown below.

3. Then, confirm the prompt by clicking on Spotlight for everyone again.

Now, the selected participant’s video will be spotlighted in the meeting. If you want to end spotlighting, follow the below-mentioned steps.

4. As you did earlier, right-click on the name of the participant and now select the Exit spotlight option as shown below.

5. Finally, confirm the prompt by clicking on Exit spotlight as shown below.

Note: To spotlight your video, you can right-click on your video and click on Spotlight me option or go to the participant’s list, right-click on your name and select the Spotlight me option.

Also Read: How to Access Microsoft Teams Admin Center Login

7. Presenter mode

The presenter mode will keep the audience more engaged towards the meeting since the presenter is also visible in the presentation. Rather than sharing only the window or screen, this amazing feature will become an integral part of the meeting with its Standout (deletes your background and shows your content of presentation), Side-by-side (Both your feed and content will appear next aside), and Reporter ( the presentation will run to the right of your shoulder as if you watch it on TV reports) modes. Here are a few instructions to use the presenter mode in Teams.

Note: If you are using the web app or mobile version of Teams, the presenter and the presentation will appear separately. You are advised to use the desktop version of the app to make use of this Presenter Modes feature.

1. Once the meeting has started, click on the Share content option as shown.

2. Make sure you have turned on your camera and selected the presenter mode you would like to use. You can customize your background, include or exclude computer sounds and give control to others when you are using this mode.

3. To exit sharing, you can click on Stop presenting option in the presenting toolbar.

8. Keyboard Shortcuts 

The below-listed keyboard shortcuts will help you work efficiently on Teams. These Microsoft Teams meeting features are very helpful to users with visionary problems. Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts that will help you, access Teams, without using a mouse.

Note: For shortcuts that uses numerical input use the numbers keys above the Alphabets keys.

• General Keyboard shortcuts

• Navigational Keyboard Shortcut

• Messaging Keyboard Shortcuts

• Meeting and Call related Keyboard Shortcuts

So, what are you waiting for? Show off with your friends with these tricky shortcuts!

Also Read: How to Change Microsoft Teams Profile Avatar

9. Hide or Show messages in Teams

You cannot delete the complete history of a channel or chat, yet you can hide or show any channel or chat in Teams by using the following steps. The chat history will resume its activity when one posts a message into it and you can resume it whenever needed. This is one of the simplest Microsoft Teams features and benefits that keeps you focused only on chats or channels that are a high priority.

1. Hover over the channel or chat that you want to hide and click on the three-dotted icon as shown.

2. Now, click on the Hide option as shown above. The selected chat will disappear from the Teams list.

Later, if you change your mind and want to unhide the chats, follow the below-mentioned steps.

3. Search for the hidden chat using the search bar and hit Enter key to open it.

4. Now, click on Show hidden chat history if you want to view it. By this time, you will see the chat/channel in the Teams list on the left pane.

5. Now, click on the three-dotted icon of your chat/channel and select the Unhide option as shown.

Likewise, you can pin your favorite chat or mute it whenever needed.

10. Bookmark Messages

Microsoft Teams meeting features like Bookmarking messages help you save your time to find any text instead of scrolling up the whole chat. Even though the message is buried down in the long history of conversation, you can easily find it by saving it for future reference. Here is how to bookmark a message.

1. When you find any message that is needed for reference in the near future, hover over the message and click on the three-dotted icon.

2. Then, select the Save this message option from the list as shown.

3. To view the saved messages, click on your profile picture and select the Saved option as depicted.

4. Now, all the saved conversations will be displayed on the left screen. You can click and access them easily.

Start saving your messages and find them easily by using this feature.

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Hope this guide was useful and you would have learned some Microsoft Teams features that you were never heard of. Feel free to reach out to us in the comment section down below with your suggestions and feedback regarding this article. Keep visiting our page for more cool tips & tricks and let us know which topic you want us to explore next.