How to add Tabs?

Glad to see you’re still with us on our Teams journey! In today’s issue, we discuss the Tabs feature and everything you can do it, as well as the ones we recommend for every user. If you’re new to the series, have a look at the previous topics we have covered to cover some basics:

What is Teams
How to navigate the Teams platform
Calling and Zoom Integration
How to Create and Join Meetings

Tabs

Depending on your requirements, you can add tabs to help integrate your favourite apps, cloud storage, files, wiki and quick links. Your team can then discuss any work or project with ease and accessible context.

Tabs give you and your team members direct access to files, services and tools in a set place within your channel or chat. It lets you have a dedicated place for your selected content and services, to discuss and use together with your team, all from one place.

Tabs are visible at the top of the screen:

The default apps for a chat are Conversations, Files, Organisation, and Activity.

Let’s look at each tab and what they mean:

Conversations/Chat – your chat history with that person

Files – the files you have worked on or shared together

Organisation – displays the org chart for your company, to see who that person reports to and who reports to them.

Activity – shows all your colleagues’ activities across the teams, channels, apps, and chats that you are a part of

The default tabs for a team are Posts, Files and Wiki as shown below:

Again, let’s look at each tab and what they mean:

Posts – the general area in your teams channel that shows what everyone has been posting

Files – same as the private chat, it shows the files and documents you have uploaded and worked on together.

Wiki – a smart-text editor where you can write text and use formatting that you are familiar with from Microsoft Word, such as bold, italics and underlining. You can also add documents to the Wiki tab for more directed communication.

Adding a Tab

Team owners or members can add additional tabs to a specific channel by clicking on the add a tab button, displayed as the + sign.

Tabs range from your preferred Office applications, websites, and external applications that your organisation uses. This means that you don’t have to leave Microsoft Teams to work with the selected tool, giving you more time to focus on the work at hand.

There are many different tabs to choose from, all depending on what you like.
Simply click the add a tab button and search for the one you need:

Adding Files

Office and PDF files, such as Excel, PowerPoint and Word, have to first be uploaded to the Files tab before they are shown on your channel/chat tabs. Once a file is uploaded, it can be easily converted to tabs:

When a custom tab is added to your channel, it opens a Tab conversation that allows you and your team members to have a single place of discussion about the content:

Adding Websites

If you or your team regularly visits a website or is working on a specific website, you can add it to the tabs section to conveniently have it open all the time. Teams will load that specific web page and save you the time from having to minimize applications and open your browser.

To add a website, search for the Website tab in the Add a tab section. The website button will look like this:

Then, add the Tab name (typically the website name) and paste the link in the provided area:

Note that the URL has to start with an https prefix in order to keep your information secure.

Check out Microsoft’s tutorial video on adding tools with Tabs

Thanks again for reading our Microsoft Teams Journey! Our aim is to equip every Microsoft Teams user, currently working from home, with the right knowledge and tools to be more efficient and make the experience a bit easier. Stay tuned for next week’s issue, coming on Tuesday!

How to add Tabs?

Tabs

Adding a Tab

Adding Files

Adding Websites

Quick Links