Chat menu

The Chat menu is used to start or continue a conversation with one or more users. You can save, filter and search conversations, and instead of the simple text, which chats used to be, you have a lot of opportunities to highlight what you wanted to say. You can format a font or paragraph of text, add emoji symbols, animated gifs, stickers …

The Chat menu is entered by clicking on the icon of the same name in the Teams menu on the left. Right next to it is a drop-down list with two options: Chat and Contacts. It allows you to organize previous conversations by name or contacts. Similar to the Activity menu, by clicking on the icon that indicates the filter, you can filter previous conversations by person, group, term …

Click on the icon to the right of the filter to start a new chat. When you do that, a text entry line will appear above the central field in which the conversation is taking place where you can enter the name of the interlocutor, e-mail address, name of the Microsoft 365 group or tag (we will talk about tags in one of the following posts). You can have conversations one-on-one or in a group, depending on how many people you want to enter. You can name a group chat to make it easier to search. This is achieved by clicking on the arrow to the right of the text entry line, and as a result a new line will appear above where you can enter the name of the conversation. Chat starts the moment you send the first message, by entering it in the box at the bottom of the screen.

On the left side of the window, as you have already seen, there is a list of all conversations marked with the date or time when they took place. If you move the cursor over the chat name, the icon marked “…” will appear on the right side. Clicking on shows the context menu which offers more options. Pin allows you to pin the conversation to the top of the list to make it easier to return to it later. In this way, it is possible to mark up to 15 conversations. If you change your mind, you can always enter the context menu and select the Unpin option to move it back at the list.

The Mark as unread option indicates the conversation is unread. After this action, the conversation will be bolded, similar to in Outlook, and then a notification will appear on the Chat menu icon. Here you can see the number of unread conversations.

Hide allows you to hide the conversation from the list. If you change your mind, you can show it again after finding it by entering a title, term, or person in the Search box. The Mute option allows you to stop receiving information about the conversation in which you participated. If there are more participants, they can continue to chat without interruption, only you will not know anything about it. You return to the previous using the Unmute option. If you have tried to contact someone who is busy, the Notify when available option allows you to receive a notification when they change their status to Available. The Add to favorite contacts option only appears when talking to individual interlocutors. If you start it the caller will be added to the contact list which you can access from the Calls menu.

When you receive a message within a chat you can also open a context menu of that message that offers several more options. Save this message allows you to add the message to your favorites. The shortcut to favorites is located in the Saved option of the user menu, in the upper right corner of the window. Just below this menu are three more icons. The first two allow you to start an audio or video call directly from the chat. The third is used to add new interlocutors.