Tuesday Tip 39: Manage Team's Chats Using Pin, Save, & Mute Tools

So. Many. Chats.

Right? I mean really, when you first started out in Teams it seemed neat and tidy and controlled and easy to see what was going on. But now....you have so many conversations going! They seem to scroll down for days and you probably find yourself wondering, how do you find the ones you need? How do you somehow keep the ones you actually care about handy? How do you mark ones you don't care about? How do you stop the DING. DING. DING without turning of ALL the notifications???

Well....I'm here to help!!

We talked about the notifications - last week  but let's dig into some additional ways to organize your chats and keep them manageable.

Pin a Conversation

When we use our browser, most of us use bookmarks. Teams has a similar feature in the Chat window.

You can Pin a conversation by simply right clicking or clicking the ... (More Options) next to the conversation and choosing Pin.

This pins it to the top of your chat window making it easy to find, even if there isn't any recent activity.

Save a Message in Chat

Saving messages in a chat is more specific. It's not about the entire conversation, but rather a specific message IN the conversation. Again, the challenge can be that we have SO much meaningful conversation in these chats, sometimes we want to make it easy to go back to a message and find it. This is what the Save allows you to do.

Select the message in the conversation you want to save and click the ... (More Options) next to it and click Save this message.

Find Saved Messages

Click on your picture in the upper right hand corner and select Saved.

This will bring up all saved items in Teams. 

You can click the Ribbon to UNsave it.

Mute a Conversation

 Muting a conversation is one of the ways you can stop notifications for JUST a single conversation. You will still see it AND see the alerts in activity, but you won't receive the sometimes seemingly incessant notifications. This can be especially helpful if it's a VERY active conversation. Also, consider doing this for just a day or a few hours if there's a window of a lot of activity, You can always unmute it later.

Click the ...(More Options) next to the conversation and select Mute.

To Unmute a conversation, click the ... (More Options) next to the conversation and select Unmute.

Hide a Conversation

Hiding a conversation allows you to remove it from the view in Chat. You aren't deleting it, but simply hiding it.  I will say, it's not very intuitive to find it again so fair warning.

Select the conversation and click the  ... (More Options)next to it and select Hide.

To Unhide a conversation, you actually have to search for something in that conversation to bring it up, then select Unhide. The Unhiding is NOT my favorite thing, guessing something better will come down the pipeline but this is it for now. My advice, use hiding sparingly for now unless you REALLY don't think you'll want to see this again.