Microsoft Teams cheat sheet: How to get started

If your organization uses Office, chances are you’ve encountered Microsoft Teams, at least for video meetings. But it’s capable of a lot more, providing an effective way for groups of people to collaborate on work and advance business objectives.

Teams is, at its core, group chat software with videoconferencing capabilities and some interesting features around working with documents and spreadsheets, especially those stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business. It’s included with Microsoft 365/Office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, making it attractive to Microsoft customers who don’t want to pay for additional chat or meeting software.

Once you get to know it, Teams is a genuinely helpful tool for teams in companies that use Microsoft 365, since it brings together a bunch of suite components and surfaces them in one convenient place.

Microsoft offers a web interface for Teams, as well as mobile apps for iOS and Android so you can stay connected from anywhere. But the best experience is offered by the desktop client. Available for Windows 10 and 11, macOS (any of the most three recent versions, consistent with Apple’s support policy), and Linux (on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, Fedora 30 Workstation, RHEL 8 Workstation, and CentOS 8), it’s a rich, full-featured application that lets you keep meetings, chats, and notes all together in one place. This story will focus on getting you acquainted with the desktop app.

Creating or joining a team

As the name suggests, Teams organizes itself around the concept of teams, which can be small groups you’re working with on specific projects, your whole department or, in some cases, even the entire company. When you launch Teams, you’ll be taken to the Teams view. The first time you launch Microsoft Teams, you’ll likely be enrolled in one or more teams.

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To create a new team, which you might need to do when you start a new project, for instance, select Join or create a team at the bottom left of the Teams window. (If you don’t see this option, make sure you’re in Teams view by clicking the Teams icon in the left navigation bar.) On the screen that appears, hover over the “Create a team” area and click the Create team button.

You need to then choose whether to create a team from scratch or create a team based on a Microsoft 365 Group (if you choose the latter, then you need to specify the group on the next screen), choose whether the team is private (only you and other owners of the team can decide which participants to include) or public (anyone who has access to Microsoft 365 in your organization can join), and then give your team a name and a friendly description so others can make sense of its purpose.

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After that, you’ll be prompted to add any relevant people, distribution groups, and security groups that might exist inside the Global Address List for Microsoft 365 in your organization. Here, think of distribution groups that get memos for your department, any particular employees, and even other email lists that might have members that would find the content of your discussions relevant. You can also designate them as members or owners of the team.

If Microsoft 365 is configured appropriately in your company, you can even invite guests from outside your organization, such as vendors and contractors, simply by typing their email addresses into the team-picking screen. Their “guest” status will be clearly denoted in all of their actions. (If you don’t have permission from your administrator to do this, Teams will report back that you are not authorized.)

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When you create a team, Teams automatically sets up certain elements of Microsoft 365 to support the team. Specifically, it creates a SharePoint team site and grants access to the members of the team you added, a Microsoft 365 Group (think of it as an Exchange or Outlook distribution list on steroids) comprising the team members, a shared OneNote notebook hosted in the cloud, and a shared Plan, something that’s part of the Microsoft Planner tool in Microsoft 365, which is beyond the scope of this article.

To manage your team at any time, click the three-dot icon next to its name in the navigator bar on the left. You’ll see a pop-up menu where you can add or remove members, create channels for the team (more on that below), change the team name or description, and more.

If you’d like to join an existing team rather than create a new one, select Join or create a team at the bottom left of the Teams window. On the screen that appears, you’ll see a list of available teams. Hover over any public team and click its Join team button to join instantly. If the team is private, you’ll need to request approval from its administrator.

Channels

Once a team is created, you’ll notice a few things in the Teams window.

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For one, a General channel has been created for the team. Channels are where you converse and collaborate. The General channel is meant to be a catch-all place where you go to start conversations when you first begin using the Teams product; usually more specific topic-related channels will spring from there.

You can create multiple channels for any given team — the Widget Launch team might want to have sales, production, and marketing channels, for example. To add a channel, click the Create more channels button. On the screen that appears, type in a name and a description for the channel, pick a privacy option if you want to limit the people who can access the channel, and click the Add button. All the channels for a team appear underneath the name of the team in the left pane.

Each channel has tabs that show up in the upper portion of the main area of the Teams screen, including tabs for posts (like conversations) and files. When someone does something new in a channel, such as adding a file or starting or continuing a conversation, that channel’s name will become bold in the left pane.

Posts

The Posts tab kind of works like Facebook or LinkedIn in that you can comment to your teammates in an ongoing conversation. Composing messages is straightforward: Just click the Start a new conversation text box, or click Reply below an existing conversation and start typing.

You can call teammates’ attention to certain parts of the conversation by tagging them with an @ sign when typing, like this: @Adele Can you share the latest workback grid? Users who have been tagged will see, in their own copies of the Teams clients, those tagged parts of the conversation highlighted in bright red so they can easily see and respond to messages. You can use emoticons, emojis, and GIFs as well — that’s what I mean by thinking of this area like Facebook.

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Other activities such as shared calls or shared files appear in a timeline fashion in the Posts tab. These can be accessed elsewhere, but they are populated and referenced in the Posts area as well, much like a news feed on a social site works. And anyone who is currently available on Teams will have a green circle with a white checkmark on their profile picture in the Posts area.

Files

You are probably beginning to get the idea that Teams is in many ways an overlay to Microsoft 365 services. This is very clear in the Files tab, which populates a list of files on the shared SharePoint team site right in your window, saving you the trouble of loading it up in your browser and clicking around. You can upload, open, edit, copy, move, download, and delete files, or get links to those documents to share with others.

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If you click on a file name, the online version of Word, Excel, and so on will open right in the Teams window, allowing you to perform lightweight edits or create simple documents from scratch without leaving the Teams client.

Adding more tabs (and apps)

The tab area is basically where all of the exciting integration action happens with Teams. Functionality from other Microsoft 365 services as well as third parties surfaces as new tabs.

For example, you can add Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, OneNote notebooks, Power BI dashboards, Planner plans, and more directly as tabs in the Teams client. Just click the plus button (+) at the far right of the tabs layout to add a new tab. There are also available integrations with third-party cloud services like GitHub, Cisco Webex, Smartsheet, and so on.

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Next page: Video and audio calls, navigation, search, more →

Video and audio calls

In Teams’ early days, it was first and foremost a chat platform. Nowadays, one of the most common tasks you’ll carry out with Teams is hosting and participating in calls.

Starting or scheduling a call

It’s pretty easy to get a simple conversation going, but where you start depends on who you want to talk to on your call and how those individuals are surfaced within the app.

To start an impromptu audio or video call with multiple people, click the Calendar icon on the left navigation bar, then click the Meet now icon at the top of the calendar screen. From the menu that appears, you can either start the meeting immediately and then invite participants once you’re in the meeting, or get a meeting link to share via email, chat, or other means.

To start an impromptu audio or video call with all members of a Teams channel, head over to that channel by clicking Teams on the left navigation bar and selecting the channel in the left selection bar. Then click the camera icon at the top right and choose Meet now from the menu that appears.

To have a one-to-one conversation with a certain contact, go to Chat in the left navigation bar, click the person you want to talk with in the selection bar, and then click either the camera icon (for a video call) or phone icon (for an audio-only call, or for a phone conversation if your organization has enabled regular telephone calls piped into your Teams client).

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You can alternatively click Calls in the left navigation bar and click the camera or phone icon next to a person’s name. Your most frequently contacted folks will appear in the list by default.

If you don’t see the person you want in the list, type the first few letters of their name in the “Type a name” field and select their name from the results list. Then click the Call button below the list to start a video call.

Some organizations have telephone connectivity integrated within Teams as well. If this is the case for you, then you’ll also see a normal telephone dial pad and you’ll be able to make regular inbound and outbound telephone calls with the Teams client, and most likely your office phone number will ring through Teams as well. This requires an investment and additional subscription on the part of your company, so you may not have this option enabled in your tenant.

To schedule a meeting in advance, click the Calendar icon on the left navigation bar and click the New meeting icon at upper right. (If you’re already in a Teams channel or a chat area, then click the Meet button or camera icon toward the top right of the Teams app window and then select Schedule meeting from the dropdown menu.) A form appears that lets you give the meeting a name, invite people or groups within your organization, select a date and time, and provide some information about the meeting.

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If you want to invite all members of a channel to the meeting, click inside the form’s Add channel field and choose a channel from the list that appears. (Alternatively, you can start in the channel, click the camera icon at the top right, and choose Schedule meeting. You’ll be taken to the same meeting scheduling form with the channel prepopulated in the “Add channel” field.)

When you’re done, click Save, and invitees will receive an email notification about the meeting. If you’ve added a channel, the meeting will be announced to channel members via the channel’s Posts tab.

Joining a call

If you’ve been invited to a meeting or call, you’ll typically receive an email or other notification message with a meeting link or Join button. Click the button or link to join the call. For scheduled meetings, you can also click Calendar in the left navigation bar, click on the meeting, and click Join. If you have been sent a meeting invitation with an ID number, you can use the Join with an ID button at the top of the Calendar screen.

Configuring your audio and video

The first time you start or join a call in Teams, you’ll be prompted with a screen to help you set up your audio and video settings for that call.

NOTE: On some systems, particularly Macs, you may be prompted to give Teams permission to record your screen, camera, or microphone. On Windows, your organization may have already given permission to Teams through its systems management software, and you may not be prompted. But if Teams is asking, click Allow to let Teams get the necessary access to each device.

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This might be good enough for a quick call, but for more precise configuration, click the slider icon to the right of “custom setup” to expand the pane as you can see in the next screen:

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For either of these options, if you have a webcam connected, Teams will grab that camera feed automatically and show you a preview of what it sees in the left window — good for last-minute touch-ups and combs and to make sure your dirty dishes aren’t in the camera’s viewable field. If you want to start the meeting with your camera off, just click the slider at the bottom left of the camera feed.

On the right side, you can select your audio devices, including your speaker volume. In most cases, Teams selects this correctly, but if you want to switch to a Bluetooth or USB headset, for instance, choose the right device from the Speaker and Microphone section of the right pane. (For headsets, you’ll most likely choose the same device for speaker and microphone.) If you want to start the meeting with your mic off, click the slider beside the small microphone icon.

Some fancy and neat stuff can happen with background filters on video calls, which will let you blur your background, replace it with a solid color, and more — click Background filters to check out these options.

Meeting controls

Once you’re in a call, either with a lot of participants or in a one-to-one conversation, you can alter the settings of the call as needed.

• If you want to add more people to the call, click People and then search for the person you want to add in the search box.
• To chat with meeting participants, click Chat and then type your messages in.
• To go off camera on a video call, click the Camera To go back on camera, click it again.
• To mute yourself, click the Mic button; click it again to unmute yourself so others can hear you.
• To share other content with participants, click the Share You can then elect to share your screen, collaborate on a shared digital whiteboard, present a PowerPoint slide deck, or share individual files to your meeting participants without broadcasting them on the screen.

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For detailed advice on what to do before, during, and after a video call to ensure a successful meeting, see “14 best practices for Microsoft Teams video meetings.”

The navigator bar

On the far left side of the Teams window, you will find a navigation bar with a menu that contains several potential places for things to surface in Teams:

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Activity: As with the “Notifications” area of Facebook, @ mentions, replies, and other notifications sent specifically to you will be highlighted here. Click the funnel icon to see filtering options.

Chat: To start a private conversation, click a team member’s name and start chatting in the main area of the screen to the right.

Teams: This area lets you see all of the teams of which you are a member, and will let you add more people, create more channels, or start conversations in channels within each of those teams.

Calendar: This part of the client essentially surfaces your calendar from your Microsoft 365 mailbox. As covered above, you can also schedule, start, or join a meeting through this tab.

Calls: In addition to initiating audio and video calls as detailed above, you can add contacts to speed dial, check your voicemail, and look at your call history through this tab.

Files: This tab grabs files from SharePoint, OneDrive, and OneNote, and helpfully surfaces what you’ve used most recently in the Recent view. You can also go right over to your personal OneDrive from within the client to find other files and monitor the progress of larger file downloads to your local computer.

The … icon: Here you can add additional applications to the Teams client, including Planner data, OneNote, live streaming, and more. You can also use the search box or click the More apps link within the three-dot icon pop-up — or click the Apps button at the bottom of the nav bar — to add third-party apps like Zoom or RingCentral into all areas of Teams (for instance, in right-click context menus) and not just within added tabs. When you add an app this way, its icon will appear in the navigator bar.

Search

Searching through any content within Teams is simple — just type a command or search keywords into the search bar at the top of the Teams client window.

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What not to do with Teams

Teams is definitely a big step up over endless email chains, but that doesn’t mean it’s suitable for everything. Here are two things to avoid:

Trying to replace all emails with Teams conversations and links. Sometimes we humans have a tendency to gravitate to whatever new features and tools there are, proclaiming them the “killer” of whatever came before and trying to force old square pegs into shiny new round holes. Teams is no different.

As an instant messaging platform, Teams is ideal for back-and-forth quick hits. If your message is longer than a paragraph, chances are, it should go back to email. Longer conversations, project planning, longer term development, all of those types of deep thinking and analysis are best suited for email. In email, you can sort, filter, set up rules, and do other automated things to manage how you see and find information. It’s not impossible to use Teams for longer conversations, but it’s suboptimal.

Trying to send emails to external folks. Unfortunately there is no way for Teams to send email out to the internet, so unless you want to invite external users as guests into your team, assuming you have permission to do that, you will need to handle some subjects that involve people outside of your organization via old-fashioned email messages. That, of course, limits the utility of using Teams in projects or environments with a lot of collaboration with external users when they’re not a part of your Teams environment.

Your organization may restrict how external users can interact with your Microsoft 365 setup, usually via data loss prevention policies and prohibitions on folks outside your organization accessing Teams chats and channels. Ask your IT department if you have questions.

Learn more

Now that you’re up and running with Teams, go beyond the basics with help from these articles:

• 28 power user tips for Microsoft Teams
• 14 best practices for Microsoft Teams video meetings
• The 10 best new Microsoft Teams meeting features

And note that Teams is one of those apps that gets updated frequently — you’re not waiting years between versions like in the old days of corporate software. For the latest on new features that might be available to you, check out Microsoft’s “What’s new in Microsoft Teams” page.

This article was originally published in March 2018 and most recently updated in October 2022.