Microsoft Teams Tutorial 2019 - How To Find, Save and Search For Things In Microsoft Teams

​In this video we look at how to keep track of things in Microsoft Teams that you might want to go back and re-visit. We look at mark as unread, save for later and the search box.

​Okay so you just started moving your conversations over from emails to teams but you're finding that you're losing some messages.

​Maybe you read stuff on your phone and you want to get back to it when you're on your laptop or you're just having a scroll through and you thought "ah, that's really important." How do I save stuff to go back and see it later when I return to it.

Today we're going to take a look at three ways you can get back to something that you've seen in teams that you want to revisit.

Mark As Unread

The first way is just making something appear unread.

As you may have seen in teams where ever there's a bold element to your channel name that means there's something there that you've not read. Say you've read everything in the general channel already so that's not bold and say this message at the bottom is really important because it needs you to do some action on it.

​On any message you can click the three dots and get more options. One option is "mark as unread" and if you click that it'll put a purple line across to say this is where you were up to when you last read the channel and it'll make the channel go bold.

That's the first easiest way to say well you were keeping up to date with the channel and it's bold you're probably going to go back through and read what's in there.

​The downsides with the first approach is that if someone does an @mention or channel mention in that channel and you click on that notification and go into the channel it's going to assume that you've read everything in that channel so that's why you might want to use the second method.

Save For Later

The second way is to save the message.

If we go back on to the bottom message and start moving our mouse over this, next to those three dots is a little bookmark icon which says save this message. If we click Save the message you'll see it pops up where your account icon is and says it's saved which is sort of highlighting to you where it has been saved to.

If you then click on your account icon and you'll see that as a section called saved and in there you'll see all the messages that you've bookmarked and it'll jump you to the place in Teams or even a chat where you bookmark those messages.

Once you're finished with the save list you can just click the bookmark again to un-mark it as saved and disappear out of your safe list so nice little neat way of keeping everything that's important to you and you could use it to-do this if you wanted to and tick it off after you've done it and just un-save those items.

Search Bar

The third way is a catch-all. The search in Teams it's really good and fast.

Imagine a scenario where you were just browsing through Teams on your mobile phone, you saw that there was something there that you would need to go back to but then you got interrupted so you didn't mark it as unread, you didn't remember to save it and you think "ah, how do I get back to it. I don't know what channel it's in, I don't know where to scroll."

Let's use an example of a search I did myself the other day. I wanted to go back to some documents that were as part of a project Team. If I search for "SIPOC" and hit enter I'm gonna see all the messages where's "SIPOC" has been mentioned in any Team in any channel and I can scroll through and click them it'll take me to the thread. I can also see any files attached to that thread.

As well as that if I just want to get back straight back to a file it does a search across all of the files that I've got access to: in any Team, in any SharePoint site and in any files in my OneDrive. It's also going to  search all of those both in the title and within the documents body.

​If you're searching for something a bit more generic but you knew it is in a certain Team there's this filter button in the search. Search for something then hit the filter button and you can search in a specific team. The filter looks slightly different whether you apply it when viewing the search from messages or from files: If you go to messages and then filter it gives you some more options. You can even search by subject a certain date range a certain Team in a certain channel even from a certain person or even where you're mentioned or where it's got an attachment.

So lots of powerful ways to filter down your search if you completely get lost in Teams just search for something that you want to find it will appear.

​So let us know you thought of this post and to like and subscribe in YouTube, and leave us a comment if you want to see more of this type of content or if there is anything else you want us to cover.

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Check out all the rest of our Teams series here​.

The most recent Teams posts are below:
How To Manage Channel Notifications In Teams
How To Manage Email Notification In Teams
How To Turn Off Notifications in Teams

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