Teach Yourself VISUALLY Microsoft Teams. Matt Wade

text “q1” in the result.

      OR

      Searching multiple words in Teams (or almost any online search engine) generally acts as a logical AND in between each word, meaning it looks for all the terms, regardless of how close they are to each other in the result. The more words you provide, the fewer results are available to show. However, sometimes, you want to cast a wider net. For those situations, you can use OR between words, which will surface results that include either of the terms you mention, rather than both. For example, searching online training (equivalent to online AND training) will return results that include both terms; however, searching online OR training will return results that include either or both terms, providing more results to look through.

      Wildcard (*)

      Place an asterisk at the end of a portion of a word to search multiple variations of that word. For example, including proj* in your search would return results that include project and projection (as well as other variations).

      Put Them Together

      The greatest results will come when you bring these and other KQL tools together into your searches regularly. For example, this is a perfectly valid search request: 2022 -2021 -2020 “health insurance” claim reimbursement form OR submi*. It should return results that include “form” or “submit” or “submission” for “health care” claim reimbursements that reference 2022 (but not 2021 or 2020). KQL can make a major difference in your search experience, and all of the tips on these pages work in Google and Bing as well.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags are something you’ve likely come across on Facebook and Twitter. They’re arbitrary terms following a # that people use to keep related messages together in an easily searchable way.

If you are familiar with Slack—a Teams chat competitor—you’ll know that it has included hashtags as a feature. Teams never officially has, though. But that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from them. By “tagging” messages with hashtags and later searching using that hashtag, you can guarantee you will only find the messages with those hashtags. This is a workaround, but a useful one.

      Use Hashtags

      

In a private chat or channel conversation, before sending the message, include your hashtag. In this case, we used #AlwaysBeShipping.

      Note: These steps are not case sensitive, though many people prefer you capitalize each word of a hashtag so they’re easier to read.

      

In the Teams search box, enter your hashtag (complete with the #). Press Enter to search.

      

In the search results, click Messages. You should see messages with those hashtags. Filter and sort using the tools provided.

      TIP

      Why don’t I see all the results I expect?

      This trick uses out-of-the-box Teams search to return a list of results that include a set of letters that’s so unique it’s unlikely it would exist elsewhere in standard language. However, if you use hashtags a lot, your results will be presented to you in an automatically filtered way. You’ll want to home in on the right result by using the filters provided in the search experience, especially the ones related to chat, channels, and dates.

Slash Commands

      Slash commands are an express lane to common features and tools in Teams that don’t require you to do much clicking to get there. Slash commands can be used to start chats, make calls, see your unread activity, view your saved list, and set your status.

      To use a slash command, type / in the Teams search box. You’ll immediately be shown a list of words you can type as an almost-keyboard-shortcut method of taking certain actions in Teams. Likely the most popular ones are /dnd, /brb, /busy, and other status-related ones—they’re quick and easy to remember—but /chat, /whatsnew, /who, and /goto can be really useful, the latter one especially so if you’re a member of a lot of Teams. A quick /testcall is also useful for making sure your audio and video devices are set up correctly before an important meeting. Not all slash commands are created equal—some appear to be a solution in search of a problem—but don’t let that undermine any of the others that are useful.