Overview of the Teams Dashboard

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this first lesson, we're going to familiarize ourselves with the Teams
• 00:08 interface or the dashboard, if you like.
• 00:11 And the purpose of this lesson is really just to get you comfortable with
• 00:14 the different areas of Teams.
• 00:16 So you know where to go in order to access things like chat, files, tabs,
• 00:21 search, all of those things.
• 00:23 And if this is the first time that you're opening Teams
• 00:27 then it might look a bit confusing first of all, so
• 00:30 let's completely demystify it and take a quick tour around the dashboard.
• 00:35 So when you open up Microsoft Teams, the first thing that's
• 00:38 immediately obvious is down the left hand side we have our main menu bar.
• 00:44 And this is really where all of the action happens.
• 00:46 It's where you access all of the different parts of Teams.
• 00:50 Now we're going to be going into each of these areas in a lot more detail,
• 00:53 than we're going to in this particular lesson.
• 00:56 But let's just briefly look at what each of these sections houses.
• 01:00 So let's start at the top, we have an activity button just here.
• 01:05 And this is basically a live feed of everything that's going on in your Teams.
• 01:11 So things like notifications will appear in here, conversations that you've had
• 01:15 will appear in here, meetings you've attended will be in here as well.
• 01:20 So it's really simply an activity log so you can get back to things quickly.
• 01:25 The next button is chat.
• 01:28 And this is where we go if we want to have a private conversation with one or
• 01:33 more people.
• 01:33 Now, private chat is very different to chatting with others in a channel or
• 01:39 a team.
• 01:40 Now, if you're a bit confused by that statement just there, don't worry it will
• 01:44 become clearer later on.
• 01:46 But if, for example, I just want to privately message one colleague and
• 01:50 not have my message sent to everybody that's a member of a channel,
• 01:54 I would come into Chat and post a message here.
• 01:57 The next button down is where we have our teams.
• 02:01 So this is going to show any teams that you're a member of or have access to.
• 02:06 Notice currently I have two teams in here and let's expand
• 02:11 Train IT Now Limited you'll see that I have two things underneath.
• 02:17 Now these are called team channels, and
• 02:19 team channels are basically where your conversations take place.
• 02:23 And we're going to discuss channels, a lot more later on.
• 02:26 But as you might expect when you add a team or
• 02:29 join a team, you can see the team channels are the parts of that team and
• 02:33 you can even create your own team channels as well.
• 02:37 And channels in general are where people go to talk about a specific topic but
• 02:42 as I said, more about that later on.
• 02:45 The next one down is a calendar.
• 02:47 So you will always have access to a group calendar in Teams.
• 02:52 And we can use this much like we use any other calendar.
• 02:55 We can schedule meetings and we can even join online meetings from here as
• 03:00 well using the meet now button in the top right hand corner.
• 03:04 The next button down is calls, so your call history is going to be
• 03:09 listed here and then underneath that we have files.
• 03:13 So currently you can see that I have a list of my recent files.
• 03:16 So these are files that I've shared within Teams.
• 03:20 And this list just gives me quick access to them and of course there's lots of
• 03:24 different actions I can take here by clicking on those three dots.
• 03:27 I can open, I can download, I can copy the link and send it to somebody else.
• 03:32 And we can access files from all different kinds of locations for
• 03:36 example, OneDrive cloud storage.
• 03:39 Next we have tasks, and
• 03:40 this is powered by the separate Microsoft application called Planner.
• 03:45 And this is like a to do list on steroids, there's a lot you can do in here and
• 03:50 you can create group to do list, group tasks, and assign tasks to others.
• 03:55 And then finally at the bottom we have approvals.
• 03:58 And again this is something we're going to discuss in more detail later on but
• 04:03 it might be that you've set up and
• 04:05 approval that goes to your manager to get them to sign off on a document.
• 04:10 And this is where all of your approvals live,
• 04:12 and you can see if that's been approved, cancelled, or rejected.
• 04:16 Underneath that we have these three dots,
• 04:19 which is a little bit mysterious until you click on them.
• 04:22 This is where we can extend the capabilities of Teams by adding other
• 04:27 applications.
• 04:28 Similarly at the bottom we have an apps area again where we can
• 04:32 browse other applications and also help at the bottom here as well.
• 04:37 So each of these sections that you go into has its own interface and
• 04:41 we'll be exploring all of these in a lot of detail as we go through the course.
• 04:47 The final thing to mention here is right at the top we have a search bar or
• 04:51 a command bar.
• 04:52 And this really serves two purposes, it allows you to search for
• 04:56 documents, people, conversations, messages from here.
• 05:01 And you can also execute commands from here as well using
• 05:05 slash command shortcuts, really useful, more about that later.
• 05:10 Over on the right hand side we have three dots again,
• 05:13 this is where you're going to find things like your settings.
• 05:16 You can also access a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts available in Teams
• 05:20 from here.
• 05:21 You can download the mobile app onto your device, and you can also check for
• 05:26 updates in Teams.
• 05:28 And I will say that Teams is being updated at a really rapid rate at the moment.
• 05:32 So I always find it's worth coming in here and just checking for
• 05:36 updates fairly frequently.
• 05:38 If you click on your profile picture,
• 05:40 this is where you have access to your profile information as well as some other
• 05:43 things which we're going to explore in this course.
• 05:46 And then finally in the top right hand corner we have those standard Microsoft
• 05:51 buttons to minimize, maximize, and close.
• 05:54 Now, the final thing worth noting here is that I'm using the Teams desktop
• 05:58 application.
• 06:00 You could use Teams for the web via your Microsoft 365 account.
• 06:05 Now both of these versions are pretty much exactly the same but
• 06:09 if I'm in my office, I tend to like to use the desktop application as
• 06:13 opposed to the web application.
• 06:16 So if you are logged in via the web and
• 06:18 you notice a couple of little differences, that's probably why.
• 06:22 The good news is, it is very simple to download the desktop application when you
• 06:27 are logged into the online version.
• 06:29 So if you want to ensure that what you're looking at is exactly the same as mine,
• 06:33 then make sure you are using the desktop version of Teams.
• 06:37 In the next lesson we're going to talk more about using Teams as a guest, so
• 06:41 I will see you over there.

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