Getting all your "stuff" in one place saves time, stress and anxiety 🧘♀️
But getting files from Outlook emails into Teams has been problematic in the past.
Find out how to quickly make sure you are only working on files in one place.
By the end of this video, you will know how to upload files with drag and drop, how to save files from office apps directly into Teams and the best way to not need to 😉
Are you struggling to get files from Outlook into Teams?
By the end of this video, you'll know how to upload files with drag and drop, how to save files from Office apps directly into Teams, and the best way to not need to do that at all. So stick around until the end to find out that expert tip.
I've got new videos on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 coming out every Tuesday, so make sure you hit the Subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified every time one comes out.
I'm Gavin Jones, a former transformation manager for a Fortune 500 company. I now help organizations of any size with modern workplace transformations. If you're interested in working together, and finding out more, then stick around until the end of the video.
How To Email Into A Channel In Microsoft Teams
So the first thing we can have a look at is how to email into a channel so you've got your email and all your attachments there, which you could have done before but now I've got a Teams button in Outlook.
So here's an email that I've sent to myself with a script attached. And if I wanted that in Teams, imagine that was from someone external coming into my inbox and then I wanted to collaborate on it and share it in Teams. We've now got a Share to Teams button. In one of our previous videos, I showed you how to do that before that button was available, where you can get the email address from Teams itself, but now you don't need to.
Just click Share to Teams, then just start typing the name of the channel we want it to go into, but because we've recently used it, the Testing channel in our YouTube team is here. So we're gonna select that one. We can even put a message in, hey, uploading this to Teams. Include attachments so they go in as well and click Share.
It says your email is on its way to Teams, and you can even go to Teams to go and look at it or just close 'cause we're in the right place. Then we jump into Teams. We can see what we saw before, where we've got a message that we put the email in line in the channel, and then the file is there, linked in as well.
So if you wanted to collaborate on that email in Teams before you then got back to the external person via email and you haven't set up external sharing, which is what we would recommend, and you can have a look at this video if you want to understand more about that with calling, then this is the best way to do it. And it's dead easy, as we've seen, just click a button, it goes straight in, and the file's there and we click it and open it.
What it's doing in the background, if we go into the files, is setting up an Email Messages folder in that channel. And then in the Email Messages folder, I've done this twice, so that's where we've got two lots, it's got the email and the attachment there to go back to. So if I click on that email, you can see the email as if you'd save that email down.
So sometimes in companies that want to save emails down into a shared location, this is also doing that for us when we forward it into a channel. And here we are with the email open and it opens directly into Teams. You can see here its sent from and to, and all the metadata from the email, as well as the email body. And you can't see the attachments there but the attachments go along with it in that same folder. So you can always get back to everything that you need to get back to there.
How To Drag And Drop From Outlook (And File Explorer) Into Teams
If you just wanted to save emails and attachments down into Teams, without having them post to the channel, you can now do that via drag and drop.
Before you needed to save them down and then go and upload them into Teams. Now you can just drag and drop straight from Outlook. So if you wanted to save the email body, we can just drag and drop that straight into Teams.
It says uploading one item, and then that script message is there. And if we click that, it'll go and load that message directly in Teams.
If we just want to save the attachment, we can do the same thing. Drag the attachment from Outlook, drag it into Teams, and it'll do the same thing, uploaded one item, and then we've got that file just there. So no more saving down to your desktop and then uploading to Teams. You can now drag and drop from anywhere.
So similarly, we can drag and drop from File Explorer. So we've got the same file. So if we just delete this one, and if we have the file there, we can just drag and drop it from File Explorer onto Teams and that's gonna upload it there for us.
What we couldn't do before is drag a folder and have the folder copy over. It just copied all the stuff, all the files out of the folder and lost all of your hierarchy. Whereas now, Team has been updated, you can drag a folder and have that folder copy over as well. So now it's uploading one item. It's got the Testing folder, and then within the Testing folder, we have Testing Backup which is exactly what we've got in File Explorer. Into that Testing folder, there's just one file called Testing Backup which is what is copied over into Teams for us.
So if you'd watched one of my previous videos, it's now a lot easier. Drag and drop works from Outlook and it works from File Explorer.
So comment below and let me know if you were struggling with files getting into Teams before you watched this video, and if this video helped and what you're gonna do differently going forward. So let me know in the comments.
How To Save Directly Into Teams From Office Apps
If you'd already opened the file and started to make some changes, people then get confused about how to save it into a team. So imagine if we just go back and delete that file, just so we don't get confused 'cause we're gonna be using the same filename.
Let's say I got this email in. I just opened this file directly in Word and then made some changes to it, and then just wanted to save it straight into Teams rather than saving it down somewhere and then saving it to Teams.
It can get a bit confusing if you don't understand that SharePoint is the background of Teams for files, which we do go through in some other of our trainings. If you're interested in that, then stick around to the end to find out more.
But basically, it will come in either as Save or Save As, and then when we go to pick where we wanna save it, we wanna save it into Sites because behind a team is a SharePoint site, which is why they call it Sites and not Teams. But if you click into Sites, you can then see all the ones that you frequently use and all the ones that you're following of either SharePoint Sites or Teams.
So we wanna go into the Testing Team for YouTube, which is our team, and we want to go into Documents. And when we we go into Documents, you'll see that we've got a folder for each channel. So we've got General and Testing. We wanna go into the Testing channel. And we just wanna save it there.
So we'll click Save, and that's how to save directly from Office apps, so Word, PowerPoint or Excel, straight into a team. So no more saving it down to your desktop and uploading it back into Teams. We can just save it there directly, which a lot of people miss, just because it's called Sites and not called Teams, which gets a bit confusing.
How To Start A New File From Teams
So the best way to then not worry about saving it into Teams, so rather than starting Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and then going to worry about where to save it, best practice, I would say, is just to go into Teams, find the channel and the folder that you want to start your file in, thank click New, and then click the file type that you want to create.
So say we wanted to create that Word document from scratch. We'd come into the Testing channel, into that folder, and click New Word document, call it a name, so we'll call it Script Test, Create. And then we've got a brand new file there for us to work on. You can always jump out into the desktop app by clicking Open in Desktop App, but whatever we type here, whether we open at the desktop app or just use this online version which is shown right in Teams, it's going to be saving every time we look to save it.
It's got co-authoring turned on by default. So anyone can go into that file and type at the same time as we're typing and we can see everything that's going on. And then if we just close that, it's gonna be automatically saved with notes in the right location. And it saves us all that hassle about where to save it, or saving it somewhere else and uploading it, or the old habit of keeping things offline until they're ready to share and then sharing it.
We need to get to working out in the open. It makes decisions, flow of information in your company way, way quicker. And that's just one of the things we work towards when we work with a company to help change the culture towards a more modern way of working and working out in the open.
Okay, so you've just seen there's quite a lot of nuance around getting files into Teams and where to start your file from and working out in the open. If you want to learn more about changing the culture of your organization to make it more productive and save your employees time and make their lives easier, then book a free strategy call with me. I'd love to have a chat and see if I can help you.
So check out these videos next, remember to give the video a like, subscribe and if you really like the video, consider supporting the channel by buying me a beer. It really does help support the channel. But thanks for watching so far and we'll see you in the next video.