Zoom may have had its day in the sun during the pandemic, but MS Teams is now proving to be an enormously popular choice for business communications; its interoperability with the MS Office suite making it an ideal solution.

To ensure you’re using Teams to its full potential, here are five quick tips and tricks.

1. Organise your Teams

When you first start using Teams, it’s likely your individual Team groups will grow very quickly. Keep things neat and tidy by grouping and ordering your list on the interface’s left-hand side, so you can always get to the information you need quickly and easily.

2. Save messages

If you’re swamped under a deluge of messages, you may want to save specific ones to call back on later. This is very straightforward – simply click on the three dots next to any message, then ‘Save this message’. You can retrieve your message list either by clicking your icon on the top right then ‘Saved’, or by simply typing /saved into the search.

3. Leverage the power of search

On the subject of search, be sure to familiarise yourself with all the commands and remember those which will be of most importance. There’s a huge array of options so you can pull up messages, teams, meetings or more – all from the search bar. This small initial time outlay spent learning the commands will save you plenty of effort in the future.

4. Make an announcement

Have a big announcement or really want to stand out amongst the noise? Simply compose a new message, then click Format, and Announcement. From here you’ll have the opportunity to add large text and a background image – meaning the message you’re about to share is certain to grab attention.

5. Run a poll

Teams allows more than just conversation. Use polls to get information out of your Team members quickly and easily. Click the Polls icon (represented by a bar chart graphic) then just type your question and answer choices. Note, however, this function may not be open to all, as it’s currently only available to those using their personal account.

Teams has a wealth of neat tricks and quick shortcuts, but just mastering these five will help you get so much more out of the software.