Microsoft Teams is where most Australian businesses now do their internal talking, and almost nobody was ever shown how to use it. People got an icon on the taskbar during a lockdown and worked it out from there.
That’s not a criticism. It’s why the same handful of small changes make a noticeable difference in almost every office we walk into.
One warning about tip lists, including the earlier version of this one. Teams changes constantly, and half the menu paths you’ll find online point at a version of the app that no longer exists. Everything below was checked against Microsoft’s current documentation in September 2026.
Learn four shortcuts, not forty
Microsoft’s keyboard shortcut list runs to well over a hundred entries. Nobody learns a hundred. These four pay for themselves in a week, on the desktop app:
- Ctrl+E jumps to Search.
- Ctrl+G goes straight to a specific chat or channel by name, which is faster than scrolling for it.
- Ctrl+N starts a new chat.
- Ctrl+Period shows the full shortcut list, so you never have to look it up again.
If you want a fifth, Ctrl+Shift+I marks a message as important, which is far more likely to get read than typing URGENT.
The meeting shortcuts that matter most
Ctrl+Shift+M toggles mute. Everyone knows that one and still hunts for the button.
Ctrl+Spacebar is the better one. It unmutes you only while you hold it, then mutes you again when you let go. Push to talk, effectively. If you work somewhere noisy or you’re on a site visit, this is the difference between a meeting people can hear and one they can’t.
Ctrl+Shift+K raises and lowers your hand without leaving the keyboard.
Pin the channels you actually use
If your list of teams and channels has grown past what fits on the screen, pin the ones you’re in daily.
Go to the channel name, hover over the upper right corner, select More options, then Pin. Unpin from the same menu.
While you’re there, hide the channels you never open. A hidden channel still notifies you for mentions and replies to threads you follow, so you don’t lose anything that was aimed at you.
Save messages instead of leaving them unread
The “leave it unread so I remember” method fails at about four items.
Hover over a message, select More options, then Save this message. A Saved section appears at the top of your list of chats and channels with everything you’ve kept. Select one and it opens the conversation in context, so you can see what was actually being discussed. Unsave it the same way when you’re done.
The Saved section only appears once you’ve saved something, which is why most people have never seen it.
Turn a message into a task
This is the tip that changes the most behaviour in a small team.
Hover over any message, select the ellipsis, then More actions, then Create Planner task. Fill in the name, due date and priority. The Create in selection decides where it goes: Private tasks keeps it to yourself, or pick a plan name to put it on a shared board. When you use a plan you can assign it to someone and post a reply in the chat so the rest of the thread can see it landed somewhere.
The alternative is what most offices do now, which is asking in the chat, getting a thumbs up, and finding out in a fortnight that nobody did it.
Fix your notifications once
Notification settings live under Settings, then Notifications and activity. Note the name; older guides say Settings then Notifications, which is why people can’t find it.
The change worth making is to stop being notified about every message in every channel and keep alerts for mentions and replies to threads you’re in. The settings search box at the top of that page is the fastest way to find a specific one.
Then use @mentions properly, because that’s what the notification setting relies on. Tag the person who needs to act. Tagging the whole team when you mean one person is how people end up turning notifications off entirely.
Filter instead of scrolling
Ctrl+Shift+F opens the filter on your chat and channel list. Ctrl+Alt+U shows all your unread chats. Ctrl+J jumps to the last read or newest message in the conversation you’re in, and Ctrl+F searches inside the current chat or channel rather than across everything.
Between those four you can usually find a message in seconds without going near the search bar.
Backgrounds, with the current menu path
Blurring or replacing your background is genuinely useful when you’re taking a client call from the kitchen table.
Before a meeting, on the pre-join screen, select Effects and avatars. For blur, use the dropdown next to Blur and choose Standard blur or Portrait blur. During a meeting it’s More actions, then Video effects and settings, then Video effects.
Microsoft’s own caution is worth repeating: blurring or replacing your background may not stop sensitive information being visible to other people on the call. Don’t rely on it if there’s a whiteboard behind you.
Your choice sticks across meetings and calls until you change it, which catches people out when the novelty background from a Friday is still on at Monday’s client call.
Use tabs so people stop asking where the file is
At the top of a channel you can add a tab that points at a file, a site or an app. If your team opens the same spreadsheet every morning, put it there. It removes the most common question in most channels.
What we actually get called about
Here’s the honest counterpoint to all of the above. Over the twelve months to 18 August 2026, Teams generated 11 service desk requests across 6 client businesses, and every single one was about access, licensing, or the app refusing to load. Not one was about how to use a feature.
Two things follow. Teams is reliable enough that people rarely need help with it, and nobody is going to ask for the tips above, so somebody has to show them.
One thing to do this week: pick one of these, not all of them. Saved messages is the one that survives, because it replaces a habit people already have with a better version of it.
If your Microsoft 365 setup has grown by accident and you’d like someone to look at it properly, see what we do.