From the course: Microsoft Teams Essential Training (2022)

Join a team in Teams

From the course: Microsoft Teams Essential Training (2022)

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Join a team in Teams

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- [Instructor] The core part of working in Microsoft Teams is communicating with a group of people and that group is called a team. Some people will create their own teams and we'll see how to do that in another video, but most people will simply join existing teams that other people have created. On the sidebar on the left, I want to make sure the Teams category is selected. Then in this big column beside that, you will see a list of all of the teams that you are a member of. I have not joined any teams yet, so that list is empty for me. One scenario is when somebody else creates a team and adds you as a member, and when that happens, you'll be a member of the team and that team will show up here on your list. But another possibility is that you might need to manually join a team that somebody in your organization created. To do that, you can click the button down here that says Join or create a team. But if you're using Teams for education, this might look a little different for you, so briefly, let's switch over to Teams for Education and Education users might see the Join or Create team button up here near the top right, but there is a different view that you can use. You can click this button near the top right with three dots to open this menu, then go to Settings, and in the General section, Education users can switch between the grid view and the list view. If we select the list view and close this, you'll see that the interface is basically the same as the Business version, with your teams listed here and the button down at the bottom to Join or create a team. So if you're using the Education version, the list view might help you follow along here, but I'm just going to go back to the Business version. And once again, we're going to click the button down at the bottom that says Join or create a team. And that will open up these options over on the right if they were not already open. And from here, you may see some suggested teams listed or if you know the name of the team that you want to join, you can use the search field. So I want to search for the social committee team and here it is in my search results. Now there are public teams and there are private teams. Public teams will always show up in these search results, but private teams can be set as hidden and those will not come up in the search. So I did find the team that I wanted, it says it's public and that means the person who created it is happy to have any new members join if they want. If I point at the team, there's a button to join it. If it were a private team, there would be a button to request to be added to the team, but since this one is public, I can just click that Join button and now I am a member of my first team and it shows up here on the list. And ultimately, you will probably be a member of several teams and they'll all show up here on the list. But let's look closer at private teams. Like any other team, the owner could just add you directly or you might be able to find it in a search. But you may also receive an invitation to a private team. To see that, I want to switch over to my email, where I have this message from Stewart, where he sent me both a link to a private team and a code for that team. These two options work differently, but I've put them together so that we can see them both. If you click the link to a private team, that sends a request to the team owner asking to add you. The code is a little more direct. If you receive a code, you don't have to request permission to join, you can just select the code and then right-click on it and choose Copy or you could just memorize that code. Then switch back over to Teams. Now I still have the search results here, so I'm going to clear that. And in Teams, you can click that Join or Create a team button and then you'll see an option here to join a team with a code. So you could paste in that code or you could just type it in from memory, then click Join team, and you will be added directly to that team and it will show up here on your list. Of course, usually a team owner would just add you directly, but I wanted you to see how the link and the code for private teams work, as well. And finally, once again for Education users, let's switch back to the Education interface, and in the Education version, we can see it looks the same as the Business version, but only if you are using the list view. Once again, if we go to the button with three dots near the top right to open this menu, then go to Settings, in the General section, you can switch to the grid view, which is the default view in the Education version. And it really does work the same, but instead of a list, your teams just show up here as a grid. And that's it. If you see some teams already on your list, then somebody has already added you and that's great. If not, you've got several options for finding and joining both public and private teams.

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