Wiki is really useful in Teams to start getting your employees used to co-authoring, to start a simple place for more permanent information than the conversation thread and to get people used to linking files and folders rather than attaching different versions 🥳
As wiki videos are some of my most popular there is something that comes up time and again in the comments... 💬
...that a wiki is not much use unless you can search. Although it is still useful for the reasons above, I get the point, so in this video we take a look at a couple of workarounds to help search a wiki in Teams 🕵️♂️
Search in Teams wiki is, well non-existent really.
By the end of this video, you'll at least know a workaround that lets you search just a little bit.
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I'm Gavin Gones 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 then stick around until the end of the video to find out more.
Part 1: Search Teams Wiki Using Microsoft Word
So let's jump into Teams and here we are in the modern workplace accelerator team and in a wiki tab and here we've just got a very light touch wiki, just one page with a couple of sections.
So here's the problem, if we search even something that we know is in there, so if I search for etiquette or disclaimer or any of these words that we know is in the wiki, in Team search; so I'm going to search for disclaimer, hit enter and it searches through messages, people and files. It doesn't see anything any messages, there's no people in any of our Teams called disclaimer and in files, it then does actually find that text 'disclaimer' in our wiki page, which was called overall etiquette and then .mht is the wiki file.
But if we go and click on it. It then doesn't take us to the wiki tab very unhelpfully and it says there's not even a preview available so please download the file. So if we download the file then and I'm just going to jump back out to get that. You open it and the default is that it's opening in Word which you can then read everything in that wiki page, which is useful. You can see the link that we had in there, that text link has expanded so that all looks a bit messy now but the rest of it's okay. But then if we did actually want to find the thing that we searched for, we then need to search that Word document. So hit command + F or control + F on a PC and then we need to search for it again and then Word will find that through a simple text search.
So not that useful if you then want to go and update part of that wiki because like it says here, "this page is automatically updated from the wiki in Microsoft Teams - any change made here will be overwritten. To edit this page open it Microsoft Teams."
That's all well and good but if you've got quite a lot of wikis and you didn't know where that overall wiki was it sort of tries to help you out: it says what Team it's in but then say you had loads of channels there's no way to then really expand that missing bit of text to see which channel it's in, to go back to it, to go and edit it, which is not that useful but does at least get you to the page that you want and you could then go through and find that specific text, then go and update it. So at least that little bit of search workaround should help a little bit.
So, I'm interested, comment below and let me know if search was stopping you from using wiki a lot in your organization.
Part 2: Using A Browser To Search A Microsoft Teams Wiki Tab
The only other way to search wiki in Teams, at the time of recording, is to do it in a browser.
So if I just jump over to a web browser, so here we've got edge, and we've got Teams open. So, same thing, if we search here it's going to do exactly the same thing. So search 'etiquette,' it's going to do the same thing and it's going to find some wikis and some files with etiquette in it even in the title or in the body of that file but the benefit of going through into the browser: if we do command + F or control + F, or if that jumps you into the search bar like it does sometimes, if you come up and do edit, 'find on page,' 'find,' that'll pop up the same little box and there we can start typing something and it'll search the text for us within the wiki just there.
So if we type 'courteous' which i know is in there somewhere and that's going to jump us down to the bottom and we can, if there's multiple matches, use the two forwards and back buttons just like a browser text search. Obviously that is only searching one page in wiki so if we had multiple pages like we do in this wiki that isn't going to search between those two pages, only gonna search what's on the screen, although it will search if you need to scroll down.
Because guidelines is a complete separate page, that's thinking it's, like I said, a web page, it's not gonna search between those two pages, it's only gonna search on one of those when you do a search via the browser.
Now admittedly that is not great functionality, it is a little workaround which might help you out a little bit but I thought it was important to make a video on it because it might influence how you structure your wiki pages and sections.
So if you've got one page with lots and lots of sections doing this text search in a browser is going to search all of those sections in one go. If you split up your wiki into multiple pages that's when the search is not going to be great and you're pretty much relying on teams finding the file and the page like we did in the first way.
So wiki is just one way to start bringing all the information your employees need into one place, if you really want to supercharge your organization and get the most out of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 and you want some help doing that and you might want to work together then book a call using the link below to find out more.
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Thanks for watching this one and I'll see you in the next video
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