So, I have seen a bunch of home office setup photos with an open Microsoft Teams client in the last couple of days, and on nearly every picture I have seen something where I thought: “I wonder if the person knows this little tip or that little nugget!”

I will cover three quick tips in this blog post and give you instructions on how you can implement them! I will share my thoughts around those three tips:

1. Pin a chat/group chat with a colleague to find it right away
2. Reach your colleagues when writing something in a channel
3. Sort your teams and hide channels you do not need

So, without further ado, let’s dive right in!

1. Pin a chat to find it right away

So, you may have moved to Microsoft Teams just a few days ago, or you started to use it more often for now. However, finding your way to the UI may be difficult – at least at the beginning!
This is why I suggest you pin your most used chats to the top, this way you don’t have to look for them every time you switch back to them!

You can do so by clicking on the three dots menu to the right of a chat or group chat. Then you just choose “Pin” and the chosen conversation will make its way to the top of your chat bar!

There you go! You pinned your first chat! You can undo this by clicking on those same three dots and select “Unpin” in case you don’t need this chat that often anymore.

2. Reach your colleagues when writing something in a channel

I got some messages through LinkedIn asking how people can set their notifications because they or their colleagues don’t get notified when someone made a post on a channel.
Of course, you can reach out to every team member in every team to figure out their notification settings, OR you just start to use the @ in Microsoft Teams! Come on. This guy feels lonely without all the mail addresses we don’t write anymore!

Whenever you write a post just think about who you want to reach out to:
Do you want to reach the whole channel? Write @channelname
Do you want to reach the whole team? Write @teamname
Do you want to reach a couple of members? Write @name of every member

This way, the people you mentioned get a separate notification and can see you really wanted them to take notice!

3. Sort your teams and hide channels you do not need

This is again more likely a housekeeping tip, but it removes confusion and clutter from your daily work in Microsoft Teams. I think most of us are members of a team where we do not really need a whole bunch of channels. In that case, I just hide those channels I do not need to see every day.

Don’t worry, as long as your colleagues keep using the @ you get notified anyways!

You can do so by clicking on those three dots to the right of the channel name you want to hide, then you pick “Hide” and the channels get hidden! You can undo this whenever you need to by clicking on “X hidden channels”, clicking the channel you want to show, and after that picking those three dots again and chose “Show”.

You can also sort your teams by click and hold on the teams name or picture. Doing so you can drag and drop each one around! Arrange them in a way you find it intuitive to pick them. Dont´t forget to add team pictures for fast visual orientation!

I hope those small tips help you throughout your daily work! In case you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter, I will be happy to answer your questions!