Teach Yourself VISUALLY Microsoft Teams. Matt Wade

Use Microsoft Search

       Search Tricks in Teams

       Use Hashtags

       Slash Commands

Search in Teams

Teams search got a major upgrade in 2021 from being a fairly simple tool to gaining a lot of power, aligning much more closely with the overall Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365.

      You can use Teams search to find conversations, files, people, and more. You can also filter your results based on location, date, people, and other aspects to help you home in on that pesky thing you’ve been looking for.

      Search in Teams

      

In the Teams search box, type the term you want to search for. Press Enter to search.

      Note: Teams will provide suggestions as you type, which may mean you don’t even have to go searching at all.

Search results will likely display on the All tab, meaning you’ll see messages, files, people, and other information types together.

      

Click the Messages tab to display results related to your conversations. Results will be split up based on most relevant and most recent.

      Note: To improve your results, use the provided refiners (filters).

      

Under Type, click Chat or Channel to filter your results by private chat or Teams content.

      

Under Team and Channel, enter a Team or channel name to filter by that Team or channel.

      

Under From, enter a person’s name to filter results related only to that person.

       Under Date, select a time frame to filter results to match a certain timeline.

       Next to My @mention, check the box to filter results only to those where you were @mentioned explicitly.

       Next to Has attachment, check the box to filter results to include only messages that reference files.

      TIP

      Why do my search options look different?

      Historically, search is an experience that Microsoft fiddles with on a regular basis. Minor changes occur frequently, and this can lead to what you see looking different from what’s shown here. Following the major update to Teams search in 2021, there will likely be many minor changes because of lessons learned and customer feedback. Use the steps in this section as a general guide.

Use Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search is a higher-tier search engine that spans all of Microsoft 365, not just Teams. Microsoft Search gives you results from Teams, Outlook, Yammer, SharePoint, OneDrive, Delve, and other Microsoft 365 apps all in one place. You can even get Bing search results incorporated with work search if you use Microsoft Edge.

      Use Microsoft Search

      

In your favorite browser, browse to office.com and log in with your work or school account.

      Note: For additional features, use Microsoft Edge.

      

In the Microsoft Search box in the suite bar at top, type the term you want to search for. Press Enter to search.

      Note: Microsoft Search will provide suggestions as you type, which may mean you don’t even have to go searching at all.

Search results will likely display under the All tab, meaning you’ll see messages, files, people, and other information types together.

      

Click Filters to pare down your results to ones that are more relevant. In this case, we are displaying only web pages modified in the last three months.

      

Use the tabs to view filtered results limited to files, sites, people, news (in SharePoint), Power BI, and conversations (across Outlook, Yammer, and Teams).

Search Tricks in Teams

      An Introduction to KQL

      Keyword query language (KQL) is a scary-sounding-but-actually-easy-to-use set of features for improving your searches so you get the best results you can in Teams (and across all Microsoft Search boxes). KQL includes a number of terms, symbols, and functions you can include in your search term to specify exactly what you mean when searching. A few of the best KQL terms are listed in this section. For the full list, search Microsoft KQL in your favorite search engine to find the most up-to-date article on all your options.

      NOT and -

      Excluding certain terms from search results is one of the most useful—if lesser known—features in most search engines, including Microsoft and Teams search. Place a - (simple hyphen or dash without a space) or the word NOT (and a space) before a word to exclude that term from your results. NOT is especially useful for removing extraneous words or terms that get associated with a word you might be searching. For example, you might want to know about the vision package to find out whether glasses are covered for you this year, yet you keep getting corporate mission vision values items in your search results. Simply search vision package -mission to remove the bad results.

      Quotes

      Add quotation marks around a phrase to return results with exactly that phrase. For example, searching revenue projection will return results that include both words, but they could be anywhere in the result; however, “revenue projection” will only be in the results if the exact phrase