Tag: Did you know

Did you know … You can move documents between Microsoft Teams?

I frequently collaborate on documents with a small group of people – not that I don’t want everyone’s input, but starting a discussion with thirty people and a blank sheet of paper can become a cat-herding endeavor. I start drafting a document with a small group of people and then present the mostly finished information to a larger team for final review. I do not want to keep track of different versions of the document spread across multiple Teams! Fortunately, you can move documents between Teams.

Find the document that you want to move. Click the not-quite-a-hamburger menu to the right of the document listing. Then select either “Move” or “Copy”.

A “Copy/Move To” dialogue will open, allowing you to select where you want to document to appear. You can navigate the folder structure within the channel’s file space or click this arrow to move outside of the channel’s file space.

Clicking the arrow once will bring show the channels within the team. Clicking it a second time will display all your Teams. Click on the team into which you want to move the document.

Select the channel in the new team where the document will appear.

If there is a folder structure within that channel’s file space, select the folder path you want. When you’re in the right place, click “Copy” or “Move”.

Did you know … A OneNote notebook and Planner board are automatically created for each Microsoft Team space?

They are! But to make them reallyuseful, add them as tabs to one of your channels. Pick the channel where you want the OneNote and/or Planner tabs to appear. In that Channel, click the “Add a tab” button. 

OneNote is straight-forward – select OneNote 

And then select the notebook with your new team’s name. Click “Save” and the notebook will be available as a tab on the channel.  

Planner is a little trickier – the automatically created Planner board does not show up until it is used (you’ll be asked to create a new Planner board if you try adding a Planner board before the automatically created one has been used). But how do you use the one that’s already there instead of making a new one? Open Planner from https://portal.office.com and select “All plans”. Find the Planner board with your new team name. Click on it to open it.

And then close it 🙂 Now you can add the Planner board to your Teams space. Click on the “Add a tab” button within your channel.   

Select “Planner” 

Click the radio button before “Use an existing plan”, then click the inverted caret, and the automatically created Planner board is a valid selection.  

  Click “Save” and the Planner board will be available as a tab in your channel. 

Did you know … you can blur the background when joining Microsoft Teams video meetings?

Do you have a two-foot-high stack of papers on the desk behind you? Does your whiteboard contain information that isn’t quite ready to be broadcast? Or maybe you are working from the aeroport and your camera is facing the main terminal hallway – all of those people running past can be distracting. Video meetings humanize participants, but what’s behind you isn’t always something you want to share with others. When you join a scheduled Teams meeting, you can use a video filter to blur all of that stuff.

Click to join a meeting.

Click the slider next to the video camera to join the meeting with video.

You will see a video preview. Click the middle slider to activate the background blurring filter.

The video preview shows the changes. If the blur sufficiently obfuscates whatever you didn’t want to show, click ‘Join now’ and join the meeting. If your desk still looks a mess … move your stuff 😊 The blur effect is not applied to things the filter considers to be in the “foreground” … so you might be able to achieve more blurring by pushing an object farther from the camera.

You can currently blur the background when joining scheduled Teams meetings. There is an RFE on UserVoice to enable this feature for ‘meet now’ meetings and video calls.

Did you know … Microsoft Teams lets you share your screen?

It does! You can share your screen within a meeting, or you can share your screen in a chat (screen sharing with chats is currently being rolled out — it is available in the Teams desktop client, but may not appear in your web client yet).

Screen Sharing In A Chat:

While you are able to chat with someone who is offline, they’ll need to be online before you can share your screen with them. Check the circle before their name — a little gray circle in it means they are offline (or hover your mouse over the larger circle to see their presence in text).

Once the person is online, click the “start sharing your screen” button to start sharing your screen.

Select what you want to share – “Desktop” will share everything you have active on your desktop. Selecting an individual application listed under “Window” will only share your screen when that application is active – convenient if you’ve got confidential information in other desktop applications, as you cannot inadvertently display it within the screen share.

Screen Sharing In A Meeting:

In a meeting, you can begin sharing before others arrive. After you have joined a meeting, click the “Open share tray” button.

Select what you want to share – as in the chat-based screen sharing, you can share your entire desktop or select a specific window. You can also share a PowerPoint presentation or a virtual white-board.

Using Screen Sharing:

When you are sharing your screen, the shared content will be outlined with a red box (the red box in the screenshot below isn’t something I drew in) to remind you that your screen is being shared.

You can move your mouse to the top of the screen to reveal a screen sharing control bar. From this bar, you can give another person control of your mouse and keyboard (or take back control).

Select the person to whom you want to give control

You can also stop sharing your screen with the “Stop presenting” button. There is also a meeting control window that appears in the lower right-hand corner of your screen – you can click the “Stop sharing” button there to stop sharing your screen too. If you were in a meeting, you’ll still be in your meeting … .just not sharing your screen. If you were in a chat, you’ll be returned to your chat. 

 

Did you know … Microsoft Teams aggregates all your Planner tasks?

Adding a Planner board to Teams spaces is a great way to manage tasks within a group or for a project, but it can be a little difficult as an individual to keep track of tasks scattered across various Teams. Microsoft Teams also provides a view of your tasks.

Click on “More apps” on the left-hand toolbar and select “Planner”

Click on “My Tasks”. You will see tasks in any Planner board that have been assigned to you. You can edit task content, change labels, and change the completion status from within this view.

Although you can edit most of the Task details, you cannot drag it between buckets on the Planner board. To do that, you need to open the containing Planner board. Currently, there’s no way to navigate directly to the Planner board from within this view. You can click the inverted caret next to “Group by …” and select “Plan” to see the name of the Planner board that contains your task. You can then find the board on https://tasks.office.com

Did you know … Microsoft Office programs can grab a screenshot for you?

You’ve encountered some odd error in an application and need to send IT support a picture. Or you’rewriting documentation. There are lots of reasons you need a picture of your computer screen. You can hit the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard (even hold Alt and hit print-screen to isolate the image to the active window). But did you know Microsoft Office programs can do that for you? On the ribbon bar, select “Insert” and locate “Screenshot”

Click on one of the “Available Windows”, and an image of the window will be inserted into your Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Outlook e-mail, or PowerPoint presentation.

Use the “Screen Clipping”selection to grab part of a window. Minimize all of your Windows. Bring up the Window of which you want an image. Now bring up the Office document into which you want the image inserted. Use Insert => Screenprint => Screen Clipping, and wait a minute. Your Office document will be minimized, your screen will get washed out, and you’ll have a cross-hair instead of a mouse pointer. Click and drag to draw a rectangle around something. When you release the mouse, whatever is in that rectangle will be pasted into your Office document.

Wait – what about those rectangles I use to highlight the image? From the ribbon bar, select “Insert”and “Shapes”. I took a University course where debugging screen shots had to have the “important bit” highlighted with a red square – that stuck with me. You’ve got an array of shapes and colours available. Pick one. Draw the shape over your image – yes, it looks like the shape covers the important part. Draw it anyway. While the shape is still selected, click “Format” in the ribbon bar. Select “Shape Fill”

Select “No Fill” (you could also use a highly transparent fill colour if you’d prefer).

Click “Shape Outline” – pick a colour, and if the line is not thick enough select “Weight” to increase the line width.

When I’m writing documentation with a lot of images, I’ll still use an image editor and ‘print screen’. There are filters that just don’t exist in the Office image editors – sometimes I want to selectively blur screen text so my work conversations are not included in documentation. Sometimes I want to create a composite image. But for small documents – showing someone the error I get on their web site, “click here, type this” – using a single application is efficient.

Did you know …OneNote can extract text from images?


You’ll need to use the application, not the OneNote website. Insert the picture – from the ribbon bar, select “Insert” then “Pictures”. Select the image you want and click OK.

Right-click on the image. “Copy Text from Picture” does exactly that – if your image is low resolution or really blurry, it’ll take a minute for this option to be available. Wait a bit and right-click again.

The text from the image is now in your clipboard. I’m pasting it into the same OneNote page, but you can paste it anywhere.

Voila! Text:

Did you know …OneDrive and SharePoint Online can search for text within images?

It can! Store pictures of business cards and you can search for names. Take pictures of installations and find a set of photos by the business signage. Search through your expense reporting receipts for a specific restaurant. You don’t even to do anything except save an image file on OneDrive for Business to enable this feature.

To find an image containing specific text, open OneDrive from WinAnywhereand use the search dialogue.

In this example, I’m looking for the receipt from a meal –but I haven’t included the restaurant name on the receipt images. But I can search for the restaurant name – type part of the name and hit enter.

The search result set include an image file:

And that’s exactly the receipt I needed!

Text indexing is performed on image files like bmp, png,jpg/jpeg, gif, tiff, and even raw. Slightly blurry out-of-focus pictures snapped in poor lighting are indexed too 😊

* Text is not immediately indexed upon upload – it took about twelve minutes before I was able to search for the image I had uploaded.

 

It’s just as easy in SharePoint Online, but did you know that the Teams “Files” are SharePoint Online document repositories? This means you can search your Teams files for text contained in images as well. From your Teams channel, select the “Files” tab and click “Open in SharePoint” to see your Files in their SharePoint Online document repository.

Use the SharePoint Online search dialog to search for text contained within images stored in the site.

The search results will include any images that contain the search text.

 

Did you know … you can use Microsoft Excel to count the number of records within a range?

I’ve been generating reports to track our Microsoft Teams adoption – how many people are using Teams, how many messages are being sent in Teams, how many Teams are there. Some of these metrics have easily visualized count-per-unit-time summaries available. Some, like the number of Teams, do not.

Team Created On
Directory Services 1/19/2017
App Proxy 1/19/2017
LDAP 1/19/2017
ADFS 1/19/2017
Nagios 1/19/2017
File Cluster 1/19/2017
Exchange Online 1/19/2017
Active Directory 1/19/2017
Commvault 1/19/2017

But it’s easy to turn a list of groups and creation dates into visualizable data. Paste the data into Excel. To find the number of items where “Created On” falls in a range, we need to be able to define that range. 01 January 2017 is easy enough, but how do you get the end of January? Excel has a function, EOMONTH, that returns the last day of a month.

Date is any date object. Offset is an integer number of months prior (negative numbers) or after (positive numbers) Date for which you want the last day of the month. I can list the dates to start and end quarters with =EOMonth(Date,2). With 01 January 2017 in cell D2, the last day of January is =EOMonth(D2,0)

 I don’t want to type01 Feb, Mar, April … flash fill and the fill handle need a few values before they can figure out the rest of a sequence. But I can use the last day of the month to get the first day of the next month – just add one! With 31 January 2017 in cell E2, I want =E2 + 1 in cell D3. (Yes, there are other ways to do this – probably dozens.)

Now that we’ve got a formula for the start and end of the month, just fill down to produce the ranges we need to see how many Teams were created each month. Then we just need a formula to do the counting for us. I use the COUNTIFS function.

=COUNTIFS($B$2:$B$1000,”>=”&D2,$B$2:$B$1000,”<=”&E2)

Counts the number of items in the range $B$2:$B$1000 (the cell range is static as the formula is copied elsewhere, hence the

Fill down – you’ll see the range remains static, and the comparison is to the D and E columns on the current row.

Voila – easily visualized data. And a graph 😊

Did you know … there are keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Teams?

I know modern software is driven by graphical user interfaces, but as an old-school Unix admin (there were loads of interface choices – Bourne shell, c shell, korn shell, bash shell!) it’s weird to take my hand away from my keyboard just to turn a bit of text bold or move to a new field. And Microsoft has done a decent job of standardizing keyboard shortcuts across their applications – ctrl-b will toggle “bold” pretty much anywhere (even Teams!)

But … within your Teams client (even the web client) hold the “Ctrl” key and type a full stop (.) and look – special keyboard shortcuts!

There’s even a link at the bottom for all of the shortcuts on Windows and Mac. I can hit ctrl-shift-1 to flip over to my Activity feed; ctrl-shift-3 puts me back in the Teams chat section.