Send and Receive Messages and Calls

Quick reference

• 00:03 Microsoft Teams is an application from Microsoft that was designed to
• 00:08 bring people together in a collaborative work environment.
• 00:12 And it's one of those applications that's really gained in popularity over the last
• 00:17 few years as more and more people have been working from home.
• 00:20 We can use Teams to connect remotely and keep in touch with other team members.
• 00:24 Now Teams is a feature rich standalone app in its own right, but
• 00:29 Windows 11 now comes with Microsoft Teams integration.
• 00:34 So if you need to chat with colleagues, family,
• 00:37 friends, we can do it right from within Windows 11.
• 00:40 And you'll find the icon by default on the taskbar.
• 00:43 And it's this one just here, the fourth one from the left.
• 00:47 If I hover my mouse over, you can see it simply says Chat.
• 00:51 Now if I click on this,
• 00:53 what we're going to find is a big long list of all of our contacts.
• 00:57 And we can synchronize our contacts from accounts like Gmail, Hotmail,
• 01:01 things like that.
• 01:03 Now I don't have too many synchronized contacts at the moment,
• 01:06 but you might find that your list of contacts is a lot longer than mine here.
• 01:11 So what can we do because this isn't by any means the full version of
• 01:15 Microsoft Teams.
• 01:16 Although if you do have Microsoft Teams installed on your PC,
• 01:20 you will see an open in Microsoft Teams link at the bottom of the window.
• 01:25 And you can see that I have that because I do have the full version.
• 01:28 If you don't, you're not going to see that, but you can still chat and
• 01:33 start video and audio calls with any of your contacts.
• 01:37 Now let's first take a look at Chat because Chat is basically
• 01:40 just a conversation, it's like the old school instant messenger.
• 01:45 So if I open up one of my contacts, in this case, Adrianna, it's going to open up
• 01:50 a chat window and I can come down here and I can type her a new message.
• 01:54 You can see I sent her a hello yesterday and she hasn't actually responded,
• 01:58 so let's see if she's going to respond this time.
• 02:01 Now notice when you type message into this little conversations area,
• 02:06 we do have some icons underneath.
• 02:08 So if I want to apply some formatting to this message, I can click
• 02:12 the Format button and it's going to open up some minimal formatting options.
• 02:16 So I can do things like make things bold, italic, underline,
• 02:19 I can change the color, all of those kinds of things.
• 02:23 I can even attach a file, and notice here,
• 02:26 I can attach from OneDrive or I can upload a file from my computer.
• 02:30 So I might have something, a Word document for example,
• 02:33 saved off into my documents that I need to share with Adrianna.
• 02:37 I can definitely do that from here as well.
• 02:39 And I can also add some personality and
• 02:43 fun into my message by adding emojis and gifts.
• 02:47 So a few little things that we can do here.
• 02:50 When we want to send a message through, we can either hit the Enter key or
• 02:54 click on the paper plane icon over on the right hand side.
• 02:57 So let's click to send that message through.
• 03:00 So chat fairly straightforward.
• 03:02 Most of us have used these types of applications before.
• 03:06 Now another thing to notice is in this Chat window,
• 03:09 in the top right hand corner, we have three other icons.
• 03:13 Now the first one here, the Add people icon,
• 03:16 allows us to invite other people to this conversation.
• 03:20 So maybe myself and Adrianna are discussing a project or a document and
• 03:24 we decide that we need to invite Jen.
• 03:27 Well, we can simply type her name into here and click on Create,
• 03:31 and Jen's going to receive an invite to this conversation.
• 03:35 Once she joins, all three of us are in the conversation and
• 03:38 we can discuss whatever we need to.
• 03:40 So really nice and
• 03:41 simple to add other participants to an existing chat conversation.
• 03:44 Another thing we can do is we can turn this chat conversation into a video
• 03:50 call or an audio call, and this really harnesses some of the power of Teams.
• 03:55 Now remember, video calls require everybody in that
• 03:59 call to have some kind of webcam or camera so that we can see their faces.
• 04:04 And an audio call is basically exactly the same as a video call,
• 04:07 except we don't have cameras enabled.
• 04:09 Now if I close down this Chat window and just pop open Chat again,
• 04:14 also notice at the top of this main chat screen we have Meet and Chat.
• 04:20 So Chat is going to allow us to type a conversation, whereas if I click
• 04:24 the drop down next to Meet, I can start a meeting or I can schedule a meeting.
• 04:29 So the difference between these two is start a meeting is basically an ad hoc
• 04:34 meeting, it's one that we create on the fly.
• 04:37 So in the example I just gave you where maybe we're all having a conversation in
• 04:41 the Chat window, we might decide that this would be better discussed in a video or
• 04:46 audio meeting.
• 04:47 So I can start one straightaway just by clicking the Start a meeting now button,
• 04:52 whereas the schedule a meeting is going to take me into my calendar where I
• 04:57 can schedule a meeting for a future date.
• 04:59 So maybe I want to schedule a meeting for tomorrow or next week,
• 05:03 that is when I would use this option.
• 05:05 So let's just say Start a meeting now.
• 05:08 So this is going to open up the Teams window and I'm now in this meeting.
• 05:13 Now at this point,
• 05:15 it's going to ask me if I want to invite anybody to join this meeting.
• 05:20 So in reality, I would probably invite Adrianna or
• 05:23 other people that I have showing in the list.
• 05:25 Remember, I don't have barely any contacts on this account.
• 05:29 If I want to invite somebody using a link, I could copy the link to this meeting and
• 05:33 maybe send it in an email to somebody else asking them to join,
• 05:37 that's another way that we could do this.
• 05:39 Also notice, I have a little pencil icon just here, which is going to allow me to
• 05:44 change the name of this meeting to make it a bit more meaningful.
• 05:47 So maybe this is a sales meeting, I can simply type that in and click Save.
• 05:53 Now Adrianna isn't actually a real person, so I'm not going to invite her,
• 05:58 but let's click close and
• 06:00 take a look at some of the options that we have when we're in a meeting.
• 06:04 And if you are a Teams user, then these are going to look very familiar.
• 06:08 Now the first icon here is to show all of the participants in this meeting.
• 06:13 So currently, that is only me, but if there were more people,
• 06:16 we would see them listed down here.
• 06:17 I also have another opportunity to share the invite to this meeting.
• 06:21 The next icon along is where we can have a chat conversation.
• 06:25 So again, this is very similar to the chat panel we were just looking at.
• 06:29 We can have text based conversations down here and
• 06:31 we have the same icons underneath to format and attach things to our messages.
• 06:36 The next icon along is reaction.
• 06:38 So if somebody says something that you particularly like,
• 06:42 you might want to send a love heart, and
• 06:44 that's going to show a love heart on the screen as they're speaking.
• 06:48 We then have three dots.
• 06:49 So this opens up the more actions pane.
• 06:52 And there's lots of different things we can do in here.
• 06:55 We can change our background effect, we can check our device settings,
• 06:59 we can customize meeting options, things like that.
• 07:03 So definitely have a little look through these.
• 07:05 And notice at the top here, I can turn my camera off or on.
• 07:09 So if I start the meeting with my camera on, it might be at one point I want to
• 07:13 turn it off, so I can quickly toggle that off just there.
• 07:17 I can also put myself on mute so nobody can hear me and I can unmute myself again.
• 07:23 We then have a Share content button.
• 07:26 So this is really useful if you want to share your screen or
• 07:29 share a specific application window with everybody in your meeting.
• 07:33 Quite often when I'm running training sessions, I will share my screen so
• 07:37 that I can go through a tutorial.
• 07:39 It may be Excel or something like that, and
• 07:41 everybody's going to be able to see it.
• 07:43 So really nice and simple.
• 07:45 And then finally, we have a big Leave button.
• 07:48 If we click the drop down, we can choose to leave the meeting or end the meeting.
• 07:52 So if we leave the meeting, the meeting will still continue,
• 07:56 we just won't be a part of it.
• 07:57 Whereas if we end the meeting, it's going to end the meeting for
• 08:01 everybody who's logged in.
• 08:02 Now we haven't gone through this window in any great detail at all because this isn't
• 08:07 a Teams training course.
• 08:09 But hopefully, if you've never used Teams before, this gives you a rough idea
• 08:14 as to how things work and how easy it is to start meetings and check conversations
• 08:19 with other team members using the new inbuilt chat feature in Windows 11.

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