If your team, too, uses Slack for communication, familiarizing yourself with the best Slack features and tricks can help you use it more effectively and be more productive. Here are all the best Slack tips and tricks you must know to get more out of your Slack usage.
1. Create Channels
Slack revolves around workspaces. If you’ve got a workplace on Slack, you can get more out of it by creating various channels. A channel in Slack allows you to keep all your discussions organized and improve your collaboration experience. For instance, if you have a workspace for your ongoing project that relies on a huge software stack, you can create channels for different modules to maintain relevancy locally and make it easier for users to discuss and find related conversations. Here’s how to create a channel in Slack: Additionally, Slack also allows you to create private channels for when you need to keep conversations restricted to a few team members. Such Slack channels are only accessible to those with an invitation link.
2. Enable Two-Factor Authentication
We can’t stress how crucial it is these days to have a second factor of authentication—in addition to the password—across all your different online accounts. [Guide to enable two-factor authentication] Follow these steps to add a 2FA to your Slack account:
3. Integrate Third-Party Apps
For teams that rely on third-party apps to get things done, Slack offers the option to integrate these apps into your workspace. Some of the available apps include Google Drive, Google Sheets, Box, OneDrive, 1Password, Giphy, IFTTT, and RSS, among others. Here’s how to integrate a third-party app to your Slack workspace: Alternatively, you can open the Slack app, go to your workspace, and tap on Apps to find all the supported third-party apps and integrate them from there.
4. Allow Video Calls and Change the Default Calling App
If you often need to be on video conference calls with your peers, you can take help from the above tip to integrate your preferred third-party video calling app of choice into your workspace. Once done, you need to change the default calling app, which you can do using these steps:
5. Create Better Polls
Companies with a large number of employees working in different departments often find the need to get collective feedback or other valuable input on different matters. If you happen to have a startup or you lead a team at an organization, and you need to conduct surveys (or polls), Slack has you covered, thanks to third-party integration. Here’s how to take advantage of this feature to create a poll in Slack: Once added, you can easily conduct polls in your Slack workspace.
6. Limit Third-Party App Installation
When you get started with Slack, the ability to install third-party applications is enabled by default. However, if you want, you can disable this to limit the number of third-party app installations on your workspace. After you do this, if a member tries to install an app in the workspace, it will require you to approve the installation at your end before it’s added. Here’s how to disable third-party app installation on Slack:
7. Filter messages
Given you’re always on and off with Slack throughout the day, you’ll likely end up with an inbox full of messages related to different subject matters. To cope with such situations and avoid missing out on important messages, Slack offers the keyword filter feature to help you get to the messages with the most relevance. Follow these steps to use this feature:
8. Hide Email address from Profiles
If privacy is one of the concerns for you or your team members, you can hide their email addresses from their profiles and make them private. Follow these steps to do this:
9. Limit Invitations
By default, Slack gives all members of a workspace the ability to invite new members. Although this can be useful sometimes, in general, you should disable this option to keep a check on who gets to add people to the workspace. Here’s how to do this:
10. Set a Reminder for Yourself
When you work with teams, tasks often get distributed among team members to improve the team’s efficiency and maximize output. For such times, setting up a reminder to finish a task in the stipulated time frame can help you stay on top of your work. Follow these steps to create a reminder:
11. Take a Quick Note
The need to jot down something can arise anytime. While your trusted note-taking app can surely help you with this, if you’re in conversation with someone on Slack and need to note down things often, the easiest way go about it is to use the direct messaging feature. Simply open a direct message to yourself and start enter text. Just like other direct messages, it will save your entire message history, and you can find it under the Direct messages section on the app. Besides notes, you can also use direct message to list your to-dos or keep files or links handy.
12. Create Custom Slackbot Responses
Slackbot is a bot in Slack that helps you send messages, deliver reminders, or notify people when they’re mentioned in a channel. While it’s pretty responsive at what it does, Slack offers you the option to create custom Slackbot responses for times when you need to respond to a particular set of queries in a specific manner. For instance, if you get a lot of queries around passwords, links, etc., you can have the Slackbot send automated responses to such queries for you. Follow these steps to set a custom response in Slackbot: To add more such responses to common queries that you often come across, hit the Add new response button, and repeat the same steps.
13. Create a To-Do List
Working with team members requires you to be on top of the tasks allotted to you or checking-in on others if you’re the lead. Although you can leverage the potential of starred messages, saved messages, and pinned messages to keep a tab on tasks and revisit them later, a better way to do this is to create a to-do list for yourself and other team members. Here’s how to create a to-do list in Slack:
14. Use Emojis to Respond Quickly
For times when you need to respond to a text message with something as trivial as, say, “completed”, “taking a look”, etc., Slack has dedicated emojis to save you the effort of having to type out such messages. To respond to a message with an emoji, go to the message to which you want to respond and click on the Add reaction button (with the emoji icon). Now, search for your desired emoji in the search bar and select it to use it as your response.
15. Save Important Messages
Slack allows you to save messages you find useful for reference later. All your saved messages are added under the Saved items tab, which you can access anytime from the left menu bar. Here’s how to save a message in Slack:
16. Universal Search
While you can move around messages, channels, or workspaces in Slack by clicking through the shortcuts in the left sidebar menu, there’s a quick and efficient way to do this to save yourself those few extra clicks. For this, from anywhere in the workspace, hit the Command + K or Ctrl + K keyboard shortcut, enter the name of the workspace, channel, or thread that you want to go to, and hit Enter / Return.
17. Power Search
Search in Search works pretty fine. However, it fails to offer results when you request complex deep-rooted queries. For such instances, there are a few hidden key modifies that you can use to modify your search based on things like time/day/date, channels, type, and more, and get a response for your query. Some of these modifiers include:
from: [name of Slack user] or to: [name of Slack user] — to find relevant messages from/to a particular team member in: [channel name] — to restrict search to a particular channel type: [text, image, etc.] — to specify the type against your search before: [date] or after: [date] — to modify results based on date has: [link, image, etc.] — to filter results that contain the modifier
Learn mode about search modifiers here.
18. Limit Incoming Notifications
By default, Slack notifications are set to send you alerts for all activities in the workspace. As you can imagine, this can be quite annoying and distracting, especially when you’re trying to focus on your work. Fortunately, you can change the notification preferences in Slack to limit distractions. Here’s how to do this:
19. Take Advantage of the Shortcuts Menu
Slack’s shortcuts menu allows you to perform certain actions quickly and easily. To access these shortcuts, click on the lightning bolt icon to the left of the message field, start entering an action name, and click on it to execute it. Or alternatively, you can also use slash commands to find and perform such specific actions in Slack. There are three types of slash commands in Slack: built-in, app-specific, and customized. However, for the purpose of this guide, we will stick to built-in slash commands. To use slash commands, type a forward slash (/) in the message field and enter the specific keyword for the slash command. List of built-in slash commands:
/archive: Archive the current channel /dm: Send a direct message to someone /msg [#channel]: Send a message to a channel /collapse: Collapse inline images and videos in the channel /expand: Expand all inline images and videos in the channel /status: Set or clear your status /topic: Set the channel topic /search [your text]: Search Slack messages and files
Learn more built-in slash commands here.
20. Use Keyboard Shortcuts
Although Slack has a pretty neat and easy-to-use UI that lets you navigate your way and perform different functions easily, you can carry out the same operations a lot quicker and easier using its keyboard shortcuts. List of useful Slack keyboard shortcuts:
Command + K or Ctrl + K: Jump to a conversation Command + shift + K or Ctrl + Shift + K: Open direct messages menu Command + shift + L or Ctrl + Shift + L: Browse all channels Option + Shift + ↑ or Alt + Shift + ↑: View previous unread channel or DM Option + Shift + ↓ or Alt + Shift + ↓: View next unread channel or DM Command + , or Ctrl + ,: Open Preferences Command + Shift + S or Ctrl + Shift + S: View Saved items Command + F or Ctrl + F: Open search window to find perform a quick search Command + Shift + [ or Ctrl+ Shift + Tab: Switch to previous workspace Command + Shift + ] or Ctrl + Tab: Switch to next workspace Command + U or Ctrl + U: Upload a file Command + Shift + J or Ctrl + Shift + J: View all downloaded files and documents M: Mute audio V: Toggle video E: Edit message R: Add an emoji reaction T: Open or reply to a thread Command + B or Ctrl + B: Bold selected text: Command + Shift + X or Ctrl + Shift + X: Cross out selected text (strike through) P: Pin/unpin a message S: Share a message A: Save a message D: Delete a message
Learn more Slack keyboard shortcuts here.
Do More On Slack! And With Greater Efficiency
Using the Slack tips and tricks listed above, you should now be able to use the different features of Slack to your advantage and get more out of the platform. While we can’t guarantee these Slack tips will turn you into a Slack expert, you can certainly incorporate them in your daily workflow to streamline it, and in turn, get better at managing your projects and organizing teams and collaborations.
