Stuck on how to use Microsoft Teams for meetings and video conference calls? Watch this video to find out all the basics. I've got new videos on Microsoft Teams coming out every Tuesday so make sure you hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified when I release a new video.
If you're struggling with Microsoft Teams meetings you are in the right place. By the end of this video, you'll know how to set up, join and use all the latest features inside a Microsoft Teams meeting or video call. I'm Gavin Jones, a former transformation manager for a Fortune 500 company and I now help organisations of any size with modern workspace transformations, using teams as the catalyst for change. I've helped thousands of people so far and now it's your turn, so let's get stuck into it.
I'm gonna go through four steps in this video so make sure you stick around to the end to make sure you hear all of them before you get started.
Step 1: Microsoft Teams Meeting Setup
Step one is how to set up your meeting and we're going to have a look at how to set it up from Teams or from Outlook because that's going to be the two easiest ways that you're going to start a meeting.
So let's jump into teams first and if you come down the left-hand side and go to your calendar you can click wherever you want to schedule your meeting. So say later today after I finish recording these youtube videos batch, just click in you can add a title, test meeting, you can put your attendees in there and obviously whatever email address you type in they will get sent that link via email. It'll go into their calendar and they just need to click on the link to join. Start and end dates and times: you can set up a repeating one there. Adding a channel into your meeting I'm going to skip for the purposes of step one we'll come back to that later. Location is you can put on, you know, you're meeting in a meeting room, you're meeting in a cafe. Any meeting that you schedule from Teams calendar will always have a team's meeting link in it, you don't need to do anything else apart from schedule a meeting in the calendar bit of teams and when you click save it's going to send it to all the participants: they're going to get a link there'll be a link in it for you without you needing to do anything else.
So I'm just going to send this to my personal address, which I'll cover-up, and then you can put some details of the meeting, so "test meeting," and then you see the save change to send as soon as I put in a person there. So we're gonna send it and i'll show you how to do the same thing in Outlook because it's slightly different.
So here I am in Outlook, I'm using a Mac so it might look slightly different to your Outlook and you can see that that meeting invite that we did in Teams has come through into my inbox and I can rsvp and say yes, no, maybe I'm coming or not and you can see it in our calendar in Outlook as well as seeing in the calendar in Teams.
If you want to schedule a meeting from Outlook we do something very similar: you can highlight a time where you want to meet. If I click that expand icon that's probably something more similar like you would see in Windows at the moment. We can call that one "test two" just so we don't get confused, we can add me again, keep the times and then if you're on a Mac you'll get this little button, if you're using outlook for the web app the button's very similar. So when we click that it's going to add a link in the description below for us.
Okay so here we are in the Windows Outlook app and here we've got a button at the top saying "New Teams Meeting" and if we click that it's going to add us a new meeting with the time that we've chosen and it's got the Teams meeting link right in there which is how it's going to show someone that's receiving the invite. So in Windows it shows you what it's going to look like, in the web or the mac app where it's just got a little tick box it's still going to do the same thing: it's going to put a link to a future meeting, it's going to go into someone's calendar and you can join that meeting link, although it's unique, at any time that you want to join it. So it can be used as a workaround for some other things such as being able to schedule a meeting in a private channel, for example, but we're not going to go through that today.
So that's step one, how to schedule a meeting, because that's gonna be the most likely thing that you wanna do is put a meeting in advance with the Teams link and have everyone join.
Step 2: Immediate Microsoft Teams Video Call
Step two is how to meet or call with somebody right now so for that we'll dive back into Teams. So the easiest way to call someone on a video call or have a meeting right away is just via chat because you're probably chatting about stuff anyway. So once you're in chat you just want to say well let's just jump on a call the video call and normal call button, audio call, is just right up in the top right-hand corner of the chat. If you don't see chat at all or you don't see those buttons it's probably because your administrator has disabled that ability so you need to go and speak to them.
There's also screen sharing so if you want to chat and share your screen, which is something I used to do quite a lot to help people out, then you can screen share if someone's just phoned you on a normal phone you can still just screen share without hanging up and having to call or get all that feedback you can just share your screen by that button as well.
That obviously works with group chats as well so once you've got a group chat going then you can just click the or video call button it's going to call everybody at the same time all the devices are going to ping and whoever picks up joins a call and whoever doesn't doesn't join the call. It's then sometimes quite difficult to rejoin though so if you do want to make sure you've got a meeting with everyone can join and leave whenever they want it's probably about to schedule a meeting like we did in step one, or you could meet in a channel which I'll show you now.
So in the teams bit of teams, we're just in the QnA bit of our modern workplace accelerator team which you might want to find out more about I'm not sure where we can help you with your modern workplace transformations, but say we're in there and we're going to meet now. Actually i'm going to jump out into the testing channel so just so I don't confuse all of our clients that we've got in that team. In the test channel we click meet now and we're going to jump straight into a meeting so you can name the meeting so we're going to call it a test meeting and we're going to click join now and then what that is going to do, I'll jump back into the other screen once it connects, is you can either add participants so you can like pull them into the meeting or if you'd already arranged to do that in the channel then you can see that both in the channel sidebar you get a little icon to show there's a meeting going on right now. Once you go into the channel the very bottom of that channel, the first thing that people see, is going to be a big banner that there's a meeting going on, how long it's been going for, you can see who's in it at this time and you just click the join meeting join button to join into that meeting that's going on.
So we will go into more into channel meetings in a future video. If you want to see that and it's not out yet then make sure you subscribe and you'll get notified when that comes out. If you're watching and it has already come out it will pop up up here somewhere and it will be in the description below for you to watch right now.
So I'm interested to hear from you, comment below and let me know what you mostly use Microsoft Teams Video Calls for.
Step 3: How To Join A Microsoft Teams Video Conference
So we'll come back to some of the new features inside a meeting in step four, so hang around for that, but for step three we're just going to go through how to join a meeting. So if you're on the receiving end and you're about to join a meeting for an interview or something, a bit worried, then step three is going to help you out so let's get into how to join a meeting that's been scheduled.
So if you're on your computer and you want to join a meeting, on a desktop or a laptop, you can come into Teams and click on the calendar icon and you'll see the meeting go in there and like I say you can join a meeting at any time. If it's close to the meeting starting, so say within five minutes, you'll get a join button right on the calendar invite without doing anything else, you just click the join button it will go in and join just like I did when I did a 'meet now.'
If it's not close to the time yet you can still click on it and then click join and you'll join it and start the meeting early effectively but be careful about doing that because it's going to ping up on everyone else that's been invited to that meeting and say Gavin has started the meeting, "oh I thought it was at two o'clock and now it's only eleven, what's going on," and everyone might just try and scrabble to join it. So you note that you can start early and be aware of that when you when you do it.
Again if you're on desktop and you don't have the Teams app or you're not registered for Teams and you've just got a link that's okay as well you can just go into your email or calendar app, presuming it's Outlook for right now, and again you can just click on the meeting there and do join teams meeting. If you've got teams it's going to open the app and sort of join it for you, and you just join now like we did before. If you don't have the teams app it's just going to open in the browser for you and it allows you to see, I think from memory, four other people at the same time maybe one, I'm not sure. I had a meeting through the browser the other day with a couple of other people and both their videos disappeared as they were sharing their screen so I'm not sure about limitations of the browser, I just know that using the desktop app is the best way to do it. Once it's in the browser all the buttons and everything is going to be exactly the same as the desktop app anyway it's just a bit of limitation of technically how many videos they can show at one time.
And then on mobile you can do exactly the same thing, so here we are on an iPad you do have to have the Teams app as long as you've got a link you can click it and it'll go to your go into your meeting. So here for example we can see all the same invites and meetings in our calendar and then we click join and it's going to be very similar experience. So we can turn the video on and off, mic, click join now and that's how you're going to join the meeting.
So when we get on to step 4 and using all the features that's going to be the desktop app.
Step 4: The Latest Features In A Microsoft Teams Meeting
So there's less features that you can do on an iPad or a phone than you can do in the desktop app so we're going to jump back onto the desktop app for step four, which is using all the features inside a meeting in Microsoft Teams.
Okay so here we are back in Teams and we're going to join the meeting we had previously. Here on the join screen the new, relatively new, join screen. So here you can see all the video options so you can turn your video on or off and here's where you can do all the new background filters. So if you click that you can do blur which it blurs your background sort of see my light blurring out but it goes a bit funny around around my ears especially with my lockdown hair. You can choose any background that Microsoft have already got in for you which I'm sure you've played around with during 2020 and obviously you can then add your own background so just 'add new' at the top.
I like to go 'au naturel' so I'll keep it off and just have my light fixture in the background. Computer audio: you can have on or off and internal mic and speakers you can make sure they're set to the right things for you there before you join. If you're in a room with a room system, Microsoft Teams room, you can click room audio it's going to use bluetooth and sort of find the right room for you and join through those speakers for you. If you're just sat in a meeting room and don't have all that stuff and you're just using one person's laptop but you want everyone to be visible, probably best to just click don't use audio because the main thing that people get wrong when they join on multiple devices in one room is that they just click on mute but that's only muting your microphone and not your speaker, you need to mute both of those. 'Don't use audio' is going to mute both of them for you and just make sure you don't end up that horrible Jimi-Hendrix-like feedback that you don't want during a meeting that's pretty good when you're listening to Jimi Hendrix though.
So let's join the meeting. So since last time I did a video on Microsoft Teams video conferencing, there has been some new things: so one, the layout is completely different so rather than having a hovering thing down the bottom, now everything's at the top. So, working from left to right, you can show your participants like you used to do. If you want to download the attendance you need to do that whilst you're in the meeting at the moment although they are changing that so you can get it afterwards but right now you need to come in here click the three dots and click download attendance if that's something you wanted to do we're not getting that right now because we don't have anyone else in the meeting it's just us.
Show conversation is going to show the chat and again where you started that meeting from is going to depend where the meeting chat goes and all the assets that we're going to be talking about from the meeting but that's how you would get and chat about the meeting as you're going through.
Hand raise: so if you want to raise your hand it's going to highlight your window for everybody and if we look at the participants you get a little red one that someone's got their hand raised and wants to say something, being very polite probably British or Canadian I would expect from such a person raising their hand in a meeting rather than just taking themselves off mute and speaking, but probably I am biased. So that's how you raise a hand and let people know you want to speak.
And then what's pretty new now is you can do a little, instead of raising your hand, you can do a little emoji which pops up on your thing so we put our hand down and that removes the highlight around us and then if we are on mute we can just give a little emoji to people there they're talking which is quite nice little way to tell people that you're liking their their content for the meeting as you're going through without having to all talk over each other.
So breakout rooms we're going to do in another video if you want to see that video leave us a comment below and make sure you hit the subscribe button because it's not out at the time of recording this video but if you're watching this back at some future point time the video is already out it'll be linked in the description below or pop up on one of the cards up here somewhere.
So breakout rooms is something that's borrowed from Zoom and some other video conferencing software and it's just to split out people into different rooms as if you're doing an in-person meeting with a large group of people and you want to split them down to do some like exercises and stuff. You can either manually sort them out or automatically assign them, how many rooms you want and click create rooms and off you go. And you can, as a moderator, you can jump between the rooms to pop up and say hello and bring people back together afterwards but like I say we'll do that in another video.
All the other cool stuff is then in the three dots so all the stuff to the right-hand side is just to share your screen, turn your video on and off and turn your mute on and off which is something you should be very used to. We'll come back to share content but the three dots I want to go through.
So device settings we've already been through that's just that you can get access to the same stuff when you joined. Meeting options you can get prior to the meeting now via teams or via the link in Outlook and it's got some useful things that might be useful if you're scheduling stuff with external users or guests which if you want to know more about that watch this video next.
So you can choose who's going to bypass the lobby, who can present so if you're doing something more like a webinar or an education session you probably don't want people stealing your thunder and presenting their own stuff. Allow attendees to unmute is a good one, especially if you've got a good large group of people and you just want everyone to go on silent because there's a few people presenting and you want everyone else to watch don't allow them to unmute themselves so you can turn that off there.
Enable meeting chat you can put as 'in meeting only' because once we'll see once we finish the meeting that will go into the chat and people can carry on chatting about that meeting once it's finished by default unless you turn that off. And 'allow reactions' so reactions is this stuff that we just we just did so if we turn that off and save it it will only allow us to raise our hand, imagine that, rather than having the full-fledged ability to give someone a big laugh.
So working our way down, if we go to meeting notes that's going to start us a wiki page. If we're meeting in a channel it's going to put us in the Team, oh here we go. If we are in the chat which what we've done just by scheduling a meeting, it's going to do us a meeting notes thing in the chat bit of the call, if that makes sense, and a tab that's called meeting notes. Now, if you're scheduling from Outlook or Teams just with some people that you put on email, having meeting notes there is not particularly useful because that chatbox effectively is going to get lost at some point unless you pin it and everyone else pins it. So I would say meeting in a channel is more useful because you keep everything together and that's why we've got a video coming up on channel meetings specifically.
So if we jump back to the meeting: 'meeting details' is just to copy your info and see what stuff's going on there and then we've got these new views. So gallery, large gallery and together mode. So gallery is just the three by three grid of people you can see as people call in, large gallery is up to 50 people like zoom and together mode is where you start to see everybody sort of layered on top of each other which is pretty cool.
Apply background effects is what we just did when we started and then turning on live captions is quite cool so we'll see if it pops up and gets what I'm saying right, I know I do mumble quite a bit and I'm not American. So I think that they've got the British accent down right now, just laughing as I'm reading it to see if it pops up like it's supposed to.
So live captions is just the ability to see what people are saying in text at the time of the meeting and you're just turning it on for your view only. So if I am in a coffee shop or something and I can't hear very well I can turn on live captions and obviously the Team's robots can hear well from the person the other side it's going to transcribe it and I can sort of read it and make sure that I'm hearing okay.
Live transcription is where it's gonna do the same thing but record it like this is what's gone on in the meeting and so you can search back through the transcriptions without recording the full meeting. So if we turn off live captions and do 'start recording' that's going to be just recording the screen and the sound and we'll see what that looks like when we stop it and then the start transcription that's going to show you what I'm talking about the difference between transcription and captions.
So transcription is literally you get a bar on the right-hand side and it's going to record and everything sort of in text like basically like doing meeting notes for you. Everything that's said in the meeting you can see in text you can go back and search for it and it's really really powerful and the video recording is obviously you can watch it back like a YouTube video. So both are useful, you might want both turned on at the same time or you might want to just have the transcript and not the recording or vice versa.
So if we, let's stop the main recording but we can see this transcription is still recording and still picking up everything that I'm saying which is funny to see it popping up as I speak. So let's stop the transcription as well and i think live transcription is the most powerful new feature of Microsoft Teams video conferencing because it allows you to take the notes, it makes everything searchable. Stream did it but it sort of then sat in Stream so now this transcription is sat in Teams it's going to be a lot more powerful for search and discovery and for people catching up post the meeting without having to watch back the whole thing which frankly they're not likely to do.
Now you know exactly how to use Microsoft Teams for meetings and video conference calls but if that's all you're using it for you are missing out on ninety percent of what Teams can do.
To find out more about the missing 90 percent, check out this video here or grab our free training deck in the description below there's a download link that you can find there.
If you like this video be sure to give us a like, subscribe and if you really like the video you want to help support the channel consider buying us a beer there's a link in the description below to do that. Before you go remember to comment below and let me know what you mostly use teams video calls for and thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video