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About this lesson
Conversations in Teams can be seen by the entire team, but what if you want to have a private chat? Learn how to start a new private chat, add people to the chat, and quickly transition to an online voice or video call. In addition, you'll see how to control your online status as well as this 'pro tip': how to add a status message to let others know important information about your availability or travel plans.
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Quick reference
Teams Private Chat
You can initiate or receive private chats via Teams.
When to use
Start a private chat when you want to communicate with a Team member but do not want to conversation journaled to the Team Posts page (Teams Chat).
Instructions
Start a chat from anyplace in Teams application by click on the New Chat icon (the pencil icon) at the top of the screen. Simply enter the user name, your message, and press enter. Note that you have the same formatting options for chats as you do for Teams posts, allowing you to attach files, send memes, gifs, stickers, and more. When you send your message, the receiver will receive an alert that a chat has been initiated and has the option of replying to you in the pop-up, or can go to Teams and reply. You can add other users to the conversation by click on the icon in the upper right that has two people and a +. Finally, you jump into a phone call or video call by clicking on the phone or video icon.
Hints & tips
- If you have trouble with the side-by-side set up, ensure you have logged out of teams, close browsers and the Teams app before setting it up.
- Chats are persisted for your review so feel free to include important details that you may want to recall later as you can look them up at any time. The history of the chat is available only to those who participated in the messaging.
- If your status is set to Do Not Disturb, you will not receive chat requests.
- 00:05 Here we are on the Team's Posts page, where a lot of team activity happens.
- 00:08 But let's say you want to have a private chat with Lidia, your Product Manager.
- 00:12 And looking at your choices, you can see here on the left,
- 00:15 that there is a Chat option.
- 00:17 When you click on Chat, you can see your previous chats, which is a great feature,
- 00:22 as you can easily review, and even search for important details.
- 00:26 So, this is great for conversations that have already happened, but
- 00:29 we want to start a new conversation.
- 00:31 And, in fact, this is an FAQ because you can look around and
- 00:35 you can see it's not obvious how to begin.
- 00:38 Turns out, this pencil icon, if you hover over it at the top of your screen,
- 00:44 here is the main way that you start a new chat.
- 00:47 When you click on it, a new item appears in your Recent list, called New chat, and
- 00:51 the To field appears.
- 00:53 Here, we can begin to type the name of the person we want to chat with.
- 00:57 In this case, Lidia.
- 00:58 All we have to do is type Lid, and that matches Lidia Holloway.
- 01:03 When we click on her card, that populates the To field with her information,
- 01:08 and we're ready to begin a conversation.
- 01:11 Now, let me show you what this looks like from both sides of the chat.
- 01:15 Megan will start a chat with Lidia saying, hey,
- 01:18 are we ready to proceed with the new launch?
- 01:24 And press Enter.
- 01:25 And now Lidia will receive a notification that Megan has started a chat with her.
- 01:29 She can click on the alert, or go to Chat to see what's going on.
- 01:36 And if she wants to reply, she says, sure.
- 01:40 Do we need Irvin, as well?
- 01:45 And you can see over on the left,
- 01:47 that there's a status that Lidia is actually responding in real-time.
- 01:52 And then Lidia gets a pop up in a chime, saying that Megan has responded.
- 01:57 Now we get both these pop ups on the same computer in this case because we're
- 02:00 in a training environment where both users are signed on to the same desktop.
- 02:03 In practice, these pop ups would appear on each person's computer or
- 02:07 mobile device independent.
- 02:08 Now, notice, that you can reply right in the pop up.
- 02:11 So, there's no need to go into Teams.
- 02:13 You can just do it right there on the screen by simply saying,
- 02:17 in this case, sure, let's loop him in.
- 02:20 And now we're seeing that pop up as if it were to happen on Lidia's side.
- 02:25 Now we're in a place where we want to invite Irvin into the conversation.
- 02:29 Megan can do this directly in the Teams app by clicking on the + Add people icon.
- 02:36 And we're going to add, Irvin.
- 02:38 In this case, on your system, you won't have a third user,
- 02:41 but this is what it looked like, exactly.
- 02:44 So you click Add Irvin, and
- 02:46 now we have all three people in the conversation at the same time.
- 02:51 In this way, you can have multiple people involved in a conversation,
- 02:55 dynamically, in real-time.
- 02:57 In some cases, you may want to switch to a real-time call.
- 03:01 Let's do this with voice.
- 03:05 Let's do this with voice, he says to everyone.
- 03:08 And can initiate a phone call by clicking on the Audio Call option.
- 03:13 If cameras are available, you can also click the Video Camera icon,
- 03:18 and start a video chat, as well.
- 03:21 By clicking on Audio Call,
- 03:22 he'll be able to automatically invite everybody into the call.
- 03:26 This is what it looks like when you receive an invitation to a call.
- 03:30 The pop up occurs and you can answer the call or decline the call.
- 03:34 If you don't do anything at all, your voicemail will answer.
- 03:38 So, returning to our setup where we have Megan on the left, chatting with Lidia,
- 03:43 and Lidia on the right chatting with Megan.
- 03:47 We can see that Megan is online, according to this indicator, which we call Status.
- 03:53 The Available status means that Megan is both online and available.
- 03:58 Now, she may decide that she wants some private time.
- 04:01 And she can do this by setting her status to Not Available.
- 04:04 Do this by clicking on your personal icon, and then clicking on your Status and
- 04:09 setting it to the status you wish for it to be.
- 04:12 The Available statuses are managed for you in some ways.
- 04:16 In the sense that if you're not in a meeting, and you're online and
- 04:19 you're active, your status will show to everybody as Available.
- 04:22 If you're in a meeting or in a chat, your status will show as Busy.
- 04:28 If you're leading a meeting, you will be set as Do not disturb.
- 04:33 If you don't want to be interrupted, you can set your status to, Do not disturb.
- 04:37 And this will change to the Do not disturb status.
- 04:40 Now, she'll see that you're set to Do not disturb.
- 04:44 If she doesn't notice this and tries to talk to you, anyway,
- 04:50 You'll get the chat message, but no pop up appears.
- 04:54 And that way, if you're sharing a desktop or a screen, or
- 04:57 you're in a meeting sharing a PowerPoint, you will not be interrupted with a pop up
- 05:01 that says, hey, why didn't you show up for lunch?
- 05:05 Or some other equally embarrassing anecdote.
- 05:07 An interesting advanced tip is that you can change your status when you have
- 05:12 the Microsoft Teams desktop application installed from the icon on the bottom
- 05:16 of your taskbar.
- 05:17 If you hover over this icon, you'll see the status indicators here.
- 05:21 So, she can change her status back to Available, anytime she wants,
- 05:25 by simply clicking on that icon.
- 05:27 One more quick tip about Status.
- 05:29 You can click on your icon, and then click Set status message, and
- 05:33 type in a message that will appear to everyone just before they text you.
- 05:38 And then you can set the check box to, Show when people message me.
- 05:43 And then set the time for this message to expire, and then Done.
- 05:47 And so, now, when Lidia, in this case, goes to chat with Megan,
- 05:51 she can see the status message that Megan has posted before she even begins to chat,
- 05:57 and maybe think twice.
- 05:59 In addition, if you hover over someone's contact card,
- 06:02 you can also see the message here.
- 06:04 This is a very useful tool when used properly.
- 06:07 So, in review, with Teams, you can have private chats with individuals or groups.
- 06:11 Chats are journaled for later reference.
- 06:14 You start a new chat by clicking the New Chat icon.
- 06:18 Real-time alerts happen to keep you up to date when chats are initiated with you,
- 06:22 and whenever you initiate chats with others.
- 06:26 You can reply directly in the alert, and jump into a voice or
- 06:29 video call whenever that's convenient.
- 06:32 Your online status is set automatically, and can be manually updated.
- 06:37 And you can actually publish a status message to inform people about your
- 06:41 availability or travel plans.
- 06:42 In our next lesson, we'll talk about working with documents in Teams.
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