Category: Technology

Did you know … there’s a Teams bot to create a quick Forms survey?

Microsoft Forms offers a nice mechanism for collecting survey results, and I often post Forms links to my Teams chats and meetings. But that means I’ve planned for the survey – it takes some time to build the survey, after all! For ad hoc surveys, I’ve been using a third-party Teams app, Polly. Unfortunately, Polly isn’t an approved place for storing company information … so while I’m happy to ask where people want to get lunch or if anyone needs a quick break, I don’t want to ask questions that contain company proprietary information.

Forms has a Teams bot that quickly creates a quick one-question survey. You’ll need to have Forms installed in your Teams space. Click on the “Store” icon, search for Forms, and select Microsoft’s Forms.

Select the name of the Team to which you want to add Forms and click “Install”.

Click “Setup” next to “Bot” to add the forms bot to your Teams space.

Now you can at-mention Forms and create a quick one-question survey. ** This works fine if you are using the Teams desktop client. In the Teams web client, adding the question removes the at-mention link (the @Forms text changes from purple to black). To create quick forms in the web client, I have to type the question/answer bit first, then hit ‘home’ to get to the front of the message and add @Forms **

Help will be displayed to remind you of the question/answer format.

Type your question and answers and send the message.

Forms will create a new post with your survey.

Survey results will be updated in real-time in the thread.

If you want to view detailed results (or export the results to Excel), visit https://forms.office.com The Forms bot creates a “Group form”, so you’ll need to select the “Group forms” tab. Click on the Teams space where you posted the form.

You’ll see the form – they’re readily identifiable because the form name starts with “<at>Forms</at>” followed by the question you posted. Select the form and you can view response details and open the response results in Excel.

One oddity – if you host a meeting in the Teams space, you can at-mention Forms to create a survey in the meeting chat. The response from the Bot – where people vote – does not appear in the meeting chat because the bot response is a new thread.

Team members will find the survey as a new thread in the channel.

This is a little confusing to me, so I just send the message to create the survey in the channel instead of using the meeting chat. Using the meeting chat would, however, associate the survey with the meeting because the message which prompted the form creation will appear in the meeting chat.

 

Did you know … You can paste records into a SharePoint list?

I’ve written about using the SharePoint REST API to maintain data in a SharePoint list, but tweaking a program to maintain your list data takes some programming knowledge. If you just want to get data into the list, it can even seem quicker to just retype the information. But you can paste data into the list too.

From your list, switch to “Quick Edit” mode

Look at the columns – the data you are pasting in will need to line up with the quick edit view.

Format your data to match the quick edit view – I often use Excel to store my data because it’s quick and convenient.

Highlight the records and click copy (or use ctrl-c)

Return to the SharePoint list. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click in the bottom left-hand corner to highlight the blank row.

Use CTRL+v to paste your new records into the list.

That’s it! You can click “Exit quick edit” to return to your normal view or close the browser tab if you’re done.

 

Did you know … you can use emojis in Teams channel names?

Beyond being fun, emojis are great for quickly finding something – instead of reading all of the channel names, I can quickly scan to find the video icon or little balloon.

To add a new channel, click the ellipsis next to the Team name and select “Add channel”

In the channel name field, hold the Windows key on your keyboard and type a full stop (period, dot, “.”). Now you’ll have an emoji keyboard.

Select an emoji and type some text.

Alphabetically, an emoji is first – so “🎞Training” will sort before “A Channel”. You can still at-mention channels with emojis in the name. For this to work well, make sure you have spaces around the emoji character. When I have a channel named “🎈Party Planning”, I cannot use @party as the at mention – Teams tells me it doesn’t find any matches.

I can use @planning to find my channel.

If I rename the channel to “🎈Party Planning” with a space between the balloon and ‘Party’, I can at-mention @party and find my channel.

And, yes, you can rename existing channels (except for the “General” channel which cannot be renamed) to include emojis – click on the ellipses next to the channel and select “Edit this channel”.

Hold the windows key and press . to bring up the emoji keyboard. Select an emoji and save the changes to your channel.

Did you know … you can use emojis in Teams channel names?

Beyond being fun, emojis are great for quickly finding something – instead of reading all of the channel names, I can quickly scan to find the video icon or little balloon.

To add a new channel, click the ellipsis next to the Team name and select “Add channel”

In the channel name field, hold the Windows key on your keyboard and type a full stop (period, dot, “.”). Now you’ll have an emoji keyboard.

Select an emoji and type some text.

Alphabetically, an emoji is first – so “🎞Training” will sort before “A Channel”. You can still at-mention channels with emojis in the name. For this to work well, make sure you have spaces around the emoji character. When I have a channel named “🎈Party Planning”, I cannot use @party as the at mention – Teams tells me it doesn’t find any matches.

I can use @planning to find my channel.

If I rename the channel to “🎈Party Planning” with a space between the balloon and ‘Party’, I can at-mention @party and find my channel.

And, yes, you can rename existing channels (except for the “General” channel which cannot be renamed) to include emojis – click on the ellipses next to the channel and select “Edit this channel”.

Hold the windows key and press . to bring up the emoji keyboard. Select an emoji and save the changes to your channel.

Did you know … you can restore a deleted Teams file?

Oh no! I’ve accidentally deleted a document from my Teams files! Can someone restore it for me?!?

Yes! I can restore it for me – I can even restore documents others have deleted from our shared Teams file spaces. From the “Files” tab, click “Open in SharePoint”

You’ll see the documents that weren’t deleted … that doesn’t help! But click on “Recycle bin” on the left-hand navigation bar.

There it is! Click to select the file.

Then click “Restore”

In the upper right-hand corner of the web site, you will see a status message indicating that the document is being restored.

When the restore completes, click away from the “Files” tab and return to it. Voila! The document is back 😊

 

Do you know … where you saved that Office 365 document?

Being able to save documents directly to Teams, to sync documents and work on them locally, and to just store documents locally provides a lot of options when you’re saving a document. For me, though, a lot of options also means I’m not always sure which option I chose 😊 In which Teams space is this document saved? Did I stash it locally because I’m not ready for other people to peruse it?

Luckily where the document is saved can quickly be displayed in the Office 365 applications. Click “File” on the ribbon bar.

The “Info” section contains the path to the document – a document that is stored in a SharePoint document library (be that a Teams Channel file space or some other SharePoint document library) will include the SharePoint site name (the Team name in the case of Teams Channel files). Clicking “Open file location” will open a browser tab to the SharePoint document library which contains the file.

A document on a local or network drive will have a path starting with the drive letter. Clicking “Open file location” will open a File Explorer window to the folder containing the document.

And a document that hasn’t been saved won’t have any file information listed.

 

Did you know … you can sync Teams files to your desktop using OneDrive for Business?

An advantage of using the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 platform is that you can work just about anywhere you have an Internet connection. This provides a lot of flexibility for mobile workers, but there are still situations where bandwidth is expensive or Internet connectivity is just unavailable. Situations where you want to be able to continue working offline.

Files stored within Teams channels are document libraries in SharePoint Online. Anything you can do in SharePoint Online works with the Teams files. SharePoint Online document libraries can be synchronized to your local drive through OneDrive for Business – which means you can work on Teams documents offline.

To set up the synchronization, you’ll need to open the Teams files in SharePoint. Select the channel and click on “Files”. Then click on the “Open in SharePoint” link.

You are now viewing the SharePoint document library. Click the “Sync” button to set up synchronization to your local computer.

Select “Sync now”

You may be asked to confirm you want to use OneDrive to open the link. You do! Click “Open link” (you can check the box to ‘Remember my choice for grvopen links’ to skip this step in the future)

If you have not yet configured OneDrive, you’ll be asked to sign in. Confirm that your logon ID is displayed and click “Sign in”

You can change the location where OneDrive stores synced files, if you wish. Click “Next” to continue.

Once OneDrive setup is completed, click “Open my OneDrive folder”.

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You will see a confirmation that the Teams document library is being synchronized.

When you view your OneDrive folder, you will see the Teams channel(s) with document libraries syncing to your local computer.

When you save a new file to the OneDrive location, or update a file, you will see a circle indicating that the file is being synchronized. You will see a green check-mark when the file is successfully synchronized to SharePoint Online.

And the changes will be visible immediately in Teams

If you no longer wish to synchronize the Teams files with your local computer, right-click on OneDrive for Business in your system tray and select “Settings”.

Click “Stop sync” on the location(s) you no longer wish to synchronize.

Files stored on your computer will not be deleted; changes locally will not be updated in SharePoint/Teams, and changes in Teams will not be updated to your computer. The icon in the status column will be removed to indicate the folder is no longer being synchronized. You can safely delete the local folder.

 

Do you know … Excel VLOOKUP?

I frequently need to correlate two sets of data – generally information about accounts, where the logon ID will be found in both data sets. I’ve imported my information into Access, defined a relationship between the two tables, and used a query to correlate my data. I’ve written quick scripts to pull the data into an associative array for correlation. These are not quick approaches.

Using the VLOOKUP function in Excel, you can search through data in rows and retrieve values from the record’s other columns. HLOOKUP provides the same function, but searches data in columns and retrieves values from the record’s other rows (Vertical Lookup and Horizontal Lookup).

Today, I have a list of individuals with their reporting structure and need to identify which accounts have Skype for Business provisioned.

The Skype user list is, unfortunately, comes from a different program.

To lookup user IDs from the first table against the Skype info in the second table, I use =VLOOKUP(B2,S4BInfo!A:B,2,FALSE)

The first parameter in the function is the information you want to find, the second parameter is the area where you’ll be looking for the data, the third parameter is the column in that range that you want to return when a match is found. The fourth parameter indicates if you want to find the closest match (‘TRUE’) or an exact match (‘FALSE’). So my formula says “find the value in B2 within columns A and B of the SBInfo tab. Return the value from column 2 of that range, and I want an identical match”.

Note that the third parameter column number may not match the column number in the sheet – if I used the range C:D from the table below, I would still want to return the data in column 2 because my target data is still the second column in the search range.

Fill down and I have a single table that contains both the reporting information that I needed and a column indicating if the individual has a Skype for Business account

 

Did you know … Teams can notify you when someone comes online?

If you send a chat message to someone who is offline, the message will be waiting for them when they sign in. But sometimes you want to know when someone becomes available. And Teams can do that for you!

In the “Chat” app, click on the “Contacts” tab. Click on the ellipses on the individual that you want to know when comes online and select “Notify when available”.

When the person is online, Teams will notify you.

You can turn the notification off the same way you turned it on.

You can view all of the accounts for which you receive availability notifications. Click on your avatar and select “Settings”.

Select “Notifications”.

Scroll down to the bottom of the notification settings and click on “Manage notifications”.

There’s the list – you can add new notifications here and remove no longer needed notifications.

 

Did you know … you can create templates in Microsoft Forms?

Microsoft Forms is a secure (and free!) alternative to SurveyMonkey, but it can be time consuming to repeatedly create essentially the same form. Fortunately, there are two ways you can use an existing form as a template for a new form.

Log into Microsoft Forms – if you’ve never used Forms before, you’ll need to create a new form. Click the “New Form” button.

Add a title and description to your form, then use the “Add question” button to build your form.

Click on “Forms” in the upper left-hand corner to return to the Forms home page. The form you created will appear under “My forms”. Click the ellipses in the upper right-hand corner of the form listing.

Select “Copy”

Volia – now there is a copy of the form.

You can also create a public form template. When editing your form, click the “Share” button.

Click “Share as a template”

Copy the URL that is displayed.

Anyone (even people outside of Windstream) can use a form template URL to create a new form. Simply access the URL and click “Duplicate it”.

There is not currently a public library of Forms templates (although I’ve suggested it on Microsoft’s UserVoice site), but if you create a template that would be useful for our organization, feel free to share it in the comments.