12 productivity keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Teams

With Microsoft Teams on your PC, Mac or mobile device, we can achieve a near perfect remote working scenario with productivity in focus.

Teams help us

• pull together a team,
• use chat instead of email – well, that’s the new official conversation in chat rather than email,
• securely edit and collaborate office files at the same time,
• better communicate with personal @mentions, focus likes and replies with just a single tap of a finger,
• customize working experiences for betterment and productivity by adding notes, websites, apps and whole lot of integration options within the Teams environment.

Keyboard shortcuts for productivity

The feature list with Microsoft Teams is ever expanding. However, in this tutorial we mainly focus on Keyboard productivity shortcuts.

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based hub for colleagues to work together. Use Microsoft Teams with your keyboard and a screen reader to explore and navigate the app main views and elements, and to move between views and functions.

You can consider the shortcuts for office productivity, or accessibility provisioning or say ease of your use or whatever the reason you may consider may make your use of Teams better.

Microsoft Teams Keyboard shortcuts

Many users find that using an external keyboard with keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Teams on Windows helps them work more efficiently.

For users with mobility or vision disabilities, keyboard shortcuts can be easier than using the touchscreen and are an essential alternative to using a mouse.

While this article mainly discusses about Teams’ keyboard shortcuts for Windows computer, they equally apply for macOS, except for ctrl and command mapping. The shortcuts discussed here refer to the US keyboard layout.

1) Mute or UnMute in Teams with Ctrl + Shift + M – toggle your audio with this easy to remember keyboard shortcut.

2) Screen sharing in Teams with Ctrl + Shift + E – toggle the keys for on and off. Remember that moment when you need to immediately stop sharing your screen without moving your cursor or want to grant your colleague a chance to take over the screen sharing.

3) Initiate a new chat with Ctrl + N – another easy to remember keyboard shortcut – which is likely to be used more than anything for casual chat conversations in Microsoft Teams.

4) Accept audio calls in Microsoft Teams with Ctrl + Shift + S keyboard shortcut. Period.

5) Rejecting calls in Teams with keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + D (to remember D for Deny) is probably another most used shortcut for earlier and easier call ending in Teams call.

Terminate an ongoing call in Teams with Ctrl + Shift + B (B for break away!) quickly and without anyone noticing if you are sharing your screening.

6) Toggle Video or webcam on off during video calls or video meeting sessions with Ctrl + Shift + O keyboard shortcut on Windows PC.

To show or hide your video during calls is of concern for most of us, so make this shortcut friendly for your eyes’ distance.

7) Search the Teams quickly with Ctrl + E for messages (both chat and conversations), files, activities and people. Just enter your search query and hit enter. Or if you are an advanced user type / to have a list of commands for quick search with Microsoft Teams.

To remember this shortcut, try saying Explore teams ie Ctrl + E (E for Explore.)

What’s your way of remembering these shortcuts, let us know in the comments?

8) Search current chat or channel messages by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F (F for Find.)

This is a quick find option for your current chat or channel and is not Microsoft Teams wide search option just like the previous shortcut which we just discussed.

9) Pressing Shift + Enter will help you by starting a new line in your chat messages. Usually when you press “Enter”, it will send the messages, however, to better present your text messages, you can use new lines with Shift + Enter.

10) Run thru navigation items on your Microsoft Team’s left sidebar with Ctrl + number (1 thru 5 or more). Numbers represent place of your action and can extend beyond 5 if you have more tabs in Teams.

Usually, Ctrl + 1 opens activity, Ctrl + 2 opens chat, Ctrl + 3 opens Teams (and channels on them), Ctrl + 4 opens Calendar, and Ctrl + 5 opens Calls tab. Should you have other customizations like apps, you can count their serial number from the top.

Using Ctrl + number is like switching tabs in your web browser so should be easy to remember.

11) Our next keyboard shortcut for Microsoft Teams is life saver for those who need to present on their meetings and must manage their sessions at once. Yes, you can quickly admit people from the lobby notifications by the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + Y. Try this and you no longer need to move your mouse around to let people participate in your meeting or webinar sessions.

12) Our final keyboard shortcut for Microsoft Teams is something which we all need to use at least once or when we are in some sort of troubleshooting mode or the pro one. Ctrl + , (comma) in Microsoft Teams opens settings options inside the app.

Teams settings provides you with the plethora of options and might be a content for an entire tutorial – for now let’s focus on what Settings have in for you. There are bunch of Teams application related settings, privacy options, notifications customization ability, devices troubleshooting options, voicemail recording features and so on.

Give Ctrl + , (comma) a try in Microsoft Teams to explore settings yourself.

Conclusion

Well, that were our eleven favorite Microsoft Teams keyboard shortcuts (for Windows 10 devices and for Mac with Ctrl and Command keys to switch between.) We use Teams on our daily work processes and find these key shortcuts productive, lifesaving and as super quick fixes.

Microsoft Teams Top Keyboard Shortcuts

Microsoft Teams shortcuts boost productivity by letting you quickly mute/unmute (Ctrl+Shift+M), toggle video (Ctrl+Shift+O), start calls (Ctrl+Shift+C/U), navigate (Ctrl+1, 2, 3 for Activity, Chat, Teams), and search (Ctrl+E). Key meeting actions include raising hands (Ctrl+Shift+K) and screen sharing (Ctrl+Shift+E), while general commands like opening settings (Ctrl+,) or viewing all shortcuts (Ctrl+.) are essential for power users.

What is your favorite? Did we miss some. Let’s discuss at our comment sections.