If you start a chat with yourself from Outlook (or a group chat with a fake account you can then delete), you can get a “Just me” chat to send yourself messages. That’s not just me, right? You text yourself the three things you need to pick up at Home Depot too …
“Pinned” channels are basically links to channels that get a listing at the top of your Teams list for quick access. The way they list the pinned teams is kind of backwards in my mind — the big text is the channel name and the small text is the team name. So I’ve got a channel named “IT Maintenance and Outage Notifications” in the “NBI/NDI” team.
If you don’t want them pinned to the top, hover your mouse over the listing and an ellipsis will appear to open more options.
Click on ‘unpin’, and the pinned link to the channel will go away.
Can’t say I’ve needed to get an Outlook attachment into Teams myself – I try to store my files in OneDrive and e-mail links instead of e-mailing a copy of the file. When I need to update something, there’s no need to send an updated copy; and no one needs to figure out if they’re looking at the “right” version. Click the link now, and you have the right version. But there are certainly scenarios where you’d have attachments to share in Teams – especially if you interact with people outside of the organization. And you used to have to save the attachment and then share it into Teams. Not anymore – you can now drag attachments directly from Outlook into Teams (this works with the Teams web client too – but you cannot use the Outlook web client for this method. The message with an attachment needs to be opened in Outlook).
If you’ve got multiple monitors, this is easier … but, if not, shrink the Outlook window so you can see both the message and Teams. Then drag the attachment icon into the message composition box in Teams. You’ll see text that says “Drop your files here” appear in Teams.
Release the mouse, and the file will be uploaded to Teams.
I didn’t realize you could show the underlying field codes in MS Word. I had a problem with my table of contents showing too many levels. Looking up how to more granularity customize the levels, I found the suggestion of using “ALT + F9” and manually editing the field code.
Table of contents … well, contents:
Table of contents field codes:
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Two ways to add text to Microsoft Whiteboard sessions — ways that aren’t dragging your finger or mouse around in an attempt to draw legible text — are available. I’d like to be able to change the font in the text box — I get that their font choice is meant to evoke hand-written text, but it strikes me as non-professional.
It’s finally here! In Teams conversations, there’s now a button to start a new conversation thread and a place to click and type a reply to an existing thread. This should make it easier to keep messages in the thread in which you want them.
I’ll prefix these instructions with a disclaimer – your company may have document retention in Teams. When you export your chat content, you’ll need to maintain appropriate retention policies yourself. In IT, we had a few information categories where retention was “useful life” – we could retain system documentation as long as the system was used. If you’re exporting a chat to keep something you are allowed to keep and then keep it outside of Teams … that’s awesome. If you are trying to keep something the company’s retention policy says should be removed … that’s probably not awesome.
Once you’ve determined that the info you are exporting is OK to export and maintain elsewhere, here’s how to export a Teams chat from within the Teams web client. Step 1, of course, is to lot into Teams at https://teams.microsoft.com and go to the chat you want to export. Scroll up to the top of the chat. If you have a really long chat, it may not be possible to export the entire thing using this approach. I might play around with it in the future, by most of my conversations are in Teams channels so I don’t have a chat that’s more than 30 or so messages.
Once you are at the top of the chat, open the developer tools (ctrl-shift-i in Chrome). Clear the errors — they clutter up the screen.
Paste the following script into the console and hit enter:
var strRunningText = "";
var collectionMessageBubbles = document.querySelectorAll('.message-body-content, .message-datetime');
for (let objMessageBubble of collectionMessageBubbles) {
strRunningText = strRunningText + "\n" + objMessageBubble.textContent;
}
console.log(strRunningText);
If you have a long series of chat messages, you’ll get some of the chat displayed and a button to copy the entire chat content to your clipboard.
If you have a shorter series of chat messages, you’ll have the text of the chat in the console window. You can highlight it and copy/paste the text elsewhere.
There’s a little cleanup that can be done – the content of the message-datetime elements have a beginning and trailing newline character along with a bunch of whitespace. You can get a cleaner timestamp (but, if you embed code within your messages … which I do … the code sections have a lot of extraneous newlines):
var strRunningText = "";
var collectionMessageBubbles = document.querySelectorAll('.message-body-content, .message-datetime');
for (let objMessageBubble of collectionMessageBubbles) {
strRunningText = strRunningText + "\n" + objMessageBubble.innerText;
}
console.log(strRunningText);
The same JavaScript works in the Teams channel conversations except the channel conversations tend to be longer … so you’re going to export some subset of the channel conversation around where you are in the web browser.
* I realized, during a multi-person chat last week, that I don’t grab the name of the individual who posted the message to the chat. Grabbing the person’s name should just entail adding the identifier for the name element into the querySelectorAll list … but that’s not something I’ve had an opportunity to check yet.
I noticed an enhancement in the Outlook Web message composition today — in addition to a spell checker and auto-complete, there is grammar advice.
Microsoft has changed the interface on Stream slightly, so my code to export the Stream transcript needed an update. since copy/paste doesn’t seem to work for everyone, the script is also available as a text file.
var objTranscriptionLines = window.angular.element(window.document.querySelectorAll('.transcript-list')).scope().$ctrl.transcriptLines;
var strRunningText = "";
for(var i = 0; i < objTranscriptionLines.length; i++){
if( objTranscriptionLines[i] ){
var strLineText = objTranscriptionLines[i].eventData.text;
strRunningText = strRunningText + "\n" + strLineText;
}
}
console.log(strRunningText);