If your team uses Microsoft Teams for communication, video meetings, or collaboration, you already know how powerful the application can be.
But let’s be real: it’s far from perfect. It looks and acts like what it is, a smattering of capabilities from other products and competitors all smashed into one giant app that’s kind of hard to define or pin down.
Several frustrations jump to the top of the list, and Microsoft is finally doing something about them. Here’s what’s changing.
“Enter” Is Changing
First up is a small change with a big impact on quality of life. The “Enter” key on your keyboard has a bit of an identity crisis. In some places, like documents or email applications, “Enter” is the cue for “start a new paragraph.” This is the O.G. use case for the key. Readers of a certain vintage will remember the key used to be called “Return”, because it represented a “carriage return” on olde-tymey typewriters. In other words, it sent the carriage down and back to the margin so you could start a new paragraph.
But in other places (including Microsoft Teams and many other messaging apps), “Enter” is the cue for sending a completed message. (If you’re wondering how this happened, join the club. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to us, either.)
You can see the problem, then: you’ve spent half the morning in Word and Outlook, where “Enter” does one thing. Then you pop over to Teams to send a message to a team. You press “Enter” to start a new paragraph (readability is important!), only to realize that you sent a half-written message instead.
If this weren’t frustrating enough, think about the fix: in Teams, you have to press “Shift+Enter” to add a paragraph break. But back in Word or Outlook, “Shift+Enter” creates a soft return, which is something else entirely!
It seems that Microsoft has gotten enough complaints about this that they’re finally doing something about it. Soon, you’ll be able to choose whether “Enter” sends a message or adds a paragraph break.
Not a revolutionary change, we admit — but one that will save frustration and even embarrassment for lots of knowledge workers.
Also New: Forward Multiple Messages
If you’ve ever tried to forward messages in Teams (something you might need to do if you’re sharing a team-wide message to a specific user), you may have seen that you can only send one at a time. It isn’t great for sharing context, leaving some users resorting to taking screenshots of conversations — something you probably don’t want to encourage.
In the next Teams update, you should see the ability to select up to five messages and forward them as a group.
Microsoft Keeps Refining Copilot in Teams
Microsoft has been in the PR doghouse lately over the way some users feel the company has aggressively pushed AI features they don’t want into places they don’t need to be. There may be some merit to this argument, but our take is to use it where it makes sense.
Teams is one of those places: many organizations already use some kind of AI note-taker when in Zoom meetings, and Microsoft is offering similar capabilities natively with Copilot. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t yet. Teams can analyze transcripts of the meeting you just finished and generate smart recaps or relevant insights. These smart recaps even include screengrabs of key moments to keep the recaps visually connected.
Blue Ridge Technology Is Here for You
That’s it for this week’s update, but as usual, we’re here to help any way we can. Call or contact anytime for high-quality managed IT services in Western North Carolina.