Category: Tip of the week

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Tip of the week

Tip of the week – Hide your own camera

When you are in a Teams meeting and using video, it can be pretty distracting with your own video. You tend to glans at it quite a lot to look at yourself instead of the other people you have a meeting with.

There is a new feature in Teams that allows you to hide your camera in a meeting, letting you focus more on the people you have a meeting with.

To hide your camera you have to click on the three dots on your camera feed.

Then select “Hide for me” in the menu.

This will push your camera out to the side, hiding your picture for you. All the participants in the meetings can still see you.

To get the camera back, click the little arrow on where your picture is, and the video feed will re-appear for you!

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Tip of the week

Tip of the week – Push to unmute

We have all been there. You are in a meeting, saying something smart, and everyone is just silent. Until someone says those dreadful words:

“Hey Ola, I think you are on mute”

I think you all know that feeling and you have to repeat yourself again, maybe losing your flow a little bit.

Staying on mute while not talking in a Teams meeting is (or should be) the common practice for everyone to avoid unwanted background noises in meetings. But this also creates the need to remember to unmute when it’s your turn to speak. And we all know that “finding” the unmute button is sometimes hard…

During January, a new shortcut was added which gives you the possibility to push down Ctrl + Spacebar (Windows) or Option + Spacebar (Mac) when you talk, and when you release the keys you will go back on mute again! To be honest, this might be my new favorite feature in Teams!

This feature is on by default in Teams, but you can turn it of if you like by going to Teams Settings > Privacy and unchecking the Keyboard shortcut to unmute.

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Tip of the week

Tip of the week – stop mirroring your camera

We have all done this. Showing something in the webcam in Teams and pointing in the wrong direction or mixing up left and right, since the camera is mirrored by default in Teams. It’s always been like this, but it’s still a tricky thing.

However, this might not be a problem for most users, but it could actually be usefull when for example showing physical things. Or it might just be that you want to see what your video feed looks like for everyone else.

This settings is set in the Device Settings panel in the meetings, click More actions (the three dots) and select Device settings. At the bottom you will find “Mirror my video” which is enabled. By disabling this, your video preview will not be mirrored anymore.

So before changing this, my camera is mirrored in my preview box like this.

When I disable the “Mirror my video” feature, it looks like this.

Like you can see, my preview is not mirrored anymore!

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Tip of the week

Tip of the week – Backgrounds in Teams mobile app

One feature I really like in Teams on the desktop is the possibility to use different backgrounds in a meeting, to have your video background blurred or replaced by a picture. I think we all are familiar with this feature.

Now, this feature has finally reached mobile devices, which in my world could be really useful since you tend to be out and about while on your mobile device.

It’s really easy to get started with and to me, it’s really useful. I tend to connect through my phone when I’m out and about which then can remove any messy background since it’s not a controlled environment like my home office.

How to enable it?

When you connect to a meeting, you will get a new option at the top of the screen called “Background effects”.

When you click that, you will get the option to select a blurred background, a Teams standard background, or a custom background.

My personal favorite to use is the blurred background since it doesn’t take any attention from me so to speak. It makes it easier to focus.

But you could just as easily upload a picture from your camera roll and use that. Like faking you are out on the golf course.

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Tip of the week

Tip of the week – Focus mode in Microsoft Word

Focusing while writing a long Word document can be really hard sometimes with distractions from other applications and windows. Or you just want to focus on the text and not the buttons around it.

Enter Focus mode. This isn’t a new feature, but I actually just learned about it.

Enabling focus mode

To enable focus mode you can either select View in the ribbon and then find Focus.

Or you can click “Focus” at the bottom of the window and this will also enable Focus mode Word.

When you enable Focus, Word will automatically go into full-screen mode, but you can still access the ribbon by moving your mouse to the top of the screen.

To exit out of the focus mode, you simply click the button again or just press the ESC button on your keyboard.

Changing backgroun color

When working on a Word document, you typically have some blank space around the document. Your background basically. This is usually white or black, depending on if you use dark mode or not.

By using Focus mode, you can actually change this color!

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you change the color of the background this will stick and you can only change it from within focus mode. However, when closing Word this will be reset back to default.

There are a few different colors to pick from, but they are quite nice!