Microsoft Teams: Meetings, Presenting, and Minute Writing

Teams, channels and chats

Teams holds two kinds of conversation, and telling them apart clears up most of the early confusion. A chat is a private message to one person or a small group. A channel is a shared space that belongs to a team, where posts stay in the open for everyone in that team to see and reply to.

The rule of thumb: a quick word with one person goes in a chat; anything the whole team should see or be able to find later goes in a channel. Files shared in a channel live in that team's shared library, so they are still there when the conversation has scrolled away.

Around the Teams screen

The geography is simple once you have seen it. The app rail down the far left switches between areas: Activity, Chat, Teams, Calendar and Files. The middle column lists your teams; click one and it expands to show its channels. Every team starts with a General channel, and the extra channels split the work into topics. The big pane shows the conversation in whichever channel you have picked, with Posts and Files tabs at the top.

The practice tool mirrors a council-sized setup with three teams. Works Depot has channels for Road Maintenance and Vehicle Bookings; channels as work areas, so you flag a pothole in one and book a ute by posting in the other. Community Services gives public-facing work its own channel, with the sports carnival planning all in one Events thread. All Staff carries whole-of-organisation news in Announcements, and a Social Club channel shows not everything needs to be formal.

Grace Nguyen, Ben Carter, Aiyana Walker, Sam Riley and Tom Ellis are fictional colleagues; you appear as 'You'. Nothing typed in the tool is real or sent to anyone, and the Reset button puts it back the way it started.

Posts, replies and @mentions

A post begins a new topic in a channel; a reply joins an existing conversation, so everything about one topic stays in one thread. The habit worth building is to answer in the thread, not with a new post; the next person can then read the whole story in one place. The most common Teams mess is people answering an old post with a brand new post, which scatters one conversation across the channel.

When you need a particular person to see something, type @ and pick their name. An @mention sends them a notification; it beats hoping they scroll past your message, and it is politer than a follow-up phone call. Your own mentions, replies and reactions all land in the Activity feed at the top of the app rail, with a red dot when something is new. Checking it when you sit back down at your desk means you never miss a message that was aimed at you.

Files that stay findable

Attach a file to a post and it lands in the channel's Files tab, stored in the cloud, one copy for everyone. That is the end of attachment ping-pong: no more emailing versions back and forth, because the Files tab always holds the latest version, and it is still there when the conversation has scrolled away.

Next session covers sharing files with the right permissions; today, just knowing the Files tab exists means you stop losing documents in email.

Set your status, and read others'

Presence is not something anyone gets taught, and it quietly shapes how people read each other on Teams. Available shows automatically while you are active, and Teams overrides it the moment a meeting starts. Busy means online but focused; Teams sets it for you in a call, a meeting or while presenting. Be right back is manual only, chosen for a short break. Appear away arrives after a few minutes idle, and Appear offline hides your presence completely until you change it yourself.

The one worth knowing well is Do not disturb: it is the only status that changes what actually reaches you, silencing banners and calls. Everything else just changes what other people see. And muting your own notifications does not stop messages arriving; it just stops the popup.

Your turn: five things to try

Ten to fifteen minutes of free play in the Teams & Channels Explorer; pairs work well, one driving and one navigating. The checklist at the bottom of the tool ticks itself off as you go:

Joining, and finding the controls

Most Teams meetings arrive as a calendar invitation with a Join button; click it near the start time, check your microphone and camera on the preview screen that appears, and join. A first meeting holds no surprises once you know what the screen looks like, and the preview screen means nobody lands in a meeting with a live microphone by accident.

Worth knowing: joining a few minutes early gives you time to sort out sound quietly; if your connection is poor, turning the camera off usually fixes the audio; and you can join from a phone or tablet with the Teams app, where the controls are the same.

The controls you actually need sit in one bar: mute and unmute your microphone, turn your camera on or off, share your screen, open the chat, raise your hand, and leave. Staying muted when you are not speaking is normal, not rude, and the red Leave button ends the meeting for you, and only you. Everything else can wait until you want it.

Scheduling, chairing and hosting

Setting a meeting up is a short job: in the Teams calendar, New Meeting, give it a clear title, add the people, pick a time, and send. The invitation carries the Join link for everyone; there is nothing else to distribute. The clear title habit matters, because the calendar is the council's shared memory: 'Project check-in, week 3' beats 'Meeting'.

Chairing well is mostly small habits: start on time, say what the meeting is for in a sentence, keep an eye on the chat for questions from people who will not interrupt, and use the participant list to mute a noisy line or see who is in the room. As host you can also start a recording, which is where consent comes in.

Three habits carry the whole obligation: announce the recording before it starts, not after; give people a real choice, so someone can ask to speak off the record and have it respected; and treat sensitive meetings differently, because performance and disciplinary conversations may not be recorded at all.

Presenting in a Teams meeting

There are two ways to put a presentation on the screen. Share Screen shows whatever is on your monitor, which is simple and works for anything. PowerPoint Live shares the deck itself, which is tidier: your notes and the upcoming slides stay on your screen while the audience sees only the slide, and people can move through it at their own pace if you let them.

A few things make presenting land: share the right thing rather than your whole desktop, close anything you would not want on screen, and pause after each slide so people on a slow connection can keep up. You will put this to work later in the course, presenting the orientation deck you build during the homework week.

From a recap to usable minutes

This is where Teams earns its keep. With Teams Premium, a recorded meeting can produce a transcript, an AI recap of what was discussed, and a list of suggested action items, in a couple of minutes rather than an afternoon of writing.

The habit that makes it safe is simple: the recap is a draft, not the record. Read it, correct anything it has misheard or misattributed, and only then does it become the minutes. AI recaps are quick and genuinely useful, and they still get names, numbers and decisions wrong often enough that a person has to check.

It helps to know how that transcript is made, and why it slips on names or in a noisy room. This short walkthrough shows how speech-to-text and handwriting recognition work, and where your file travels to be processed.

A trip to the Moon

Time to put the meeting habits to work, in a setting where nothing can go wrong. The premise: the Australian Government has selected four Roper Gulf staff, based in Katherine, for a fully funded four week placement on the Moon. The Katherine Four are representing the council at the first Pop-Up International Earth Festival, a temporary lunar settlement hosting delegations from every participating nation for a month of cultural exchange and a very unusual festival. There is no template and nobody who has done this trip before; the plan gets built as you go.

Before anything else happens, the delegation needs a meeting on the calendar, and your task is to use Copilot Chat to draft the invite that gets everyone there. Copilot Chat is Microsoft's free AI assistant, separate from the Copilot built into Word or Teams. In Microsoft Edge it sits as an icon in the top right of the browser and opens without any extra sign-in. On Chrome or another browser there is no built-in icon, so you open Copilot Chat as a website instead and sign in with your council account. Either way it is the same tool underneath, and everything from here on works the same.

Then the planning splits into roles, each with its own prompt posted in the Teams chat during the session: food supply and meal plans; lunar transport, the Hilux Moon Fleet; IT equipment, including backup power and comms with Earth; safety checklists; and a daily team meeting agenda. Copy the prompt matching your role, paste it into Copilot, and work the output until it is a one page document you are happy with. Change at least one thing rather than accepting the first draft.

What the AI recap says about your call

Picture the Katherine Four holding their planning sync. Teams Premium turns the recording into a transcript, an AI summary and a list of follow-up tasks in a couple of minutes; the same recap habit from earlier in the session. The catch: one of the five follow-up tasks gets the headcount wrong, in a way that is plausible, specific, and wrong. Reading every recap against what you actually know, before you send it on, is the whole habit. Would you have caught it before forwarding the minutes?

Actions need somewhere to live

Once you have the actions, they need somewhere to live so nothing slips. Planner turns them into a shared board with owners and due dates, which beats a list buried in an email: columns for to do, in progress and done, with a name and a date on each card.

Your orientation deck

Between now and Session 3, build a short slide deck that introduces your workplace; the kind of thing you could show a new starter on their first day. Start from the council's own template, so your deck already carries the Roper Gulf colours and logo, and gather your information before you open PowerPoint: where the building is and how a new person finds their way around, the safety protocols that matter and who to call, who is who in your team, where your team sits in the council, and what you do day to day.

Aim for six to ten slides, one idea per slide, with a plain title and no more than three short bullet points on each; a photo or a simple map helps in combination with words. You do not have to face a blank screen either: ask Copilot to draft an outline, then make it your own. Keep it safe as you go; no personal details, community information or anything sensitive goes into Copilot, first names or job titles only, and Copilot writes a first draft, not the final word.

'Done' looks like a short deck you could show a new starter, brought to Session 3 and ready to talk to for two minutes. That is all; if you get stuck, that is a good thing to bring to the session too. The task slides below carry the full brief, the Copilot outline prompt, and the council style guide.

Orientation Deck: Task SlidesPowerPoint · Roper Gulf template · downloads

Recap, and what is coming

You can now find your way around Teams, post and reply in channels, use @mentions and statuses, join and host a meeting, present a deck, record with consent, and turn a recap into minutes and tracked actions. The homework week is next: you build your orientation deck, ready to present. After that we move into Microsoft 365 in practice, presenting your deck live, sharing files with the right permissions, and using Copilot for email.