English

How to Use Microsoft Teams’ Built-In Wiki

Dec 2, 2020

312

Wikis are great at capturing information in a simple format that’s easy to read and edit. Microsoft Teams includes a wiki built into every channel that’s added to a team—here’s how to use it.

A wiki—a collaboratively-maintained online publication—is a type of content management system that can be anything from a single page to a vast trove of information like Wikipedia.
Microsoft Teams includes a wiki as one of the default tabs in every channel that’s created.

When you click on the “Wiki” tab for the first time, you’ll see a largely blank page with “Untitled Page” and “Untitled Section” on it.

Pages and sections are the building blocks of your Microsoft Teams wiki. You can have as many pages in your wiki as you like, and as many sections in each page as you like. Because wikis are unstructured by design, these page and section building blocks let you create a structure that is as simple or as complicated as you need.

You’ll want to give your wiki page a name, which is as easy as clicking “Untitled Page” and changing it to something else.

Now you can start adding sections, which are best thought of as headings that separate different blocks of content. Click on “Untitled Section” and change it to a heading for your content.

When you click on “Untitled Section” to change it, a message pops up underneath saying “Your Content Goes Here.”

This is a pointer to show you where the content goes under the section heading. We’ll come back to adding content later on once we’ve finished building the structure, so for now we’ll just add some placeholder text.

To add an additional section, hover over the first section and click on the “+” sign that appears in the bottom left.

This will add a new section.

You can add as many sections as you like, with whatever headings you like. We’ve added three additional sections using the “+” sign.

The more content you add, the longer the page will get, so there is a table of contents that you can show and hide. Click the three parallel lines (also known as a hamburger menu) in the top-left of the wiki to display your page and the sections within it.

Clicking one of the section headers will take you directly to that section. If you want to reorder the sections, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping them on the menu.

The section will immediately be renumbered in the menu and moved in the wiki page to the location you dragged it to.

You can also move wiki sections by hovering over the section heading to show the three-dot menu icon and selecting “Move Up” or “Move Down” from the menu.

You can also delete sections by clicking “Delete” in the menu, but be warned that this cannot be undone, so only delete a section if you’re sure you don’t need the contents anymore.

When you’re building the structure of your wiki, you’ll probably want more than one page. To add a page, go to the bottom of the page and section menu and click “New Page.”

This will immediately create a new page that is visible in the menu, ready for you to add a page name and new sections.

You can add as many pages as you want. Like sections, pages can be moved in the menu by dragging and dropping, or by clicking the three-dot icon next to the page title and selecting “Move Up” or “Move Down” from the menu.

You can also delete a page by clicking “Delete” in the menu, but be warned that this cannot be undone, so only delete a page if you’re sure you don’t need the contents anymore.

Once you have your pages and sections in place, it’s time to add some content. Click on the wiki under a section and a toolbar with editing options will appear at the top. Depending on your screen size, some of the options will only become visible when you click on the three-dot icon next to the toolbar.

The toolbar contains standard text editing options which should be familiar from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, email, or any other program where you can format text.

If you want to comment on a section, you can open a dedicated chat window by hovering over the section heading and clicking the chat icon.

This will open a standard Microsoft Teams chat window related specifically to that section.

To send a link to a specific section to someone, hover over the section heading, click the three-dot menu icon, and select “Copy Link” from the menu. Only people with access to the team will be able to access the link.

You can send a link to a complete page as well, by opening the hamburger menu, clicking the three-dot icon next to the page name, and selecting “Copy Link” from the menu. As with section links, only people with access to the team will be able to access it.

You can have multiple wikis in the same channel if you want to separate them out. To add another wiki, click the “+” sign next to the last tab.

In the “Add A Tab” window that opens, select “Wiki” from the tiles. (It may be in different places in the list of tiles, depending on whether you’ve added a wiki before.)

Give your wiki a name and click “Save.”

The new wiki will be added to the tabs.

To rename the original wiki, select the “Wiki” tab, click the arrow next to it, and choose “Rename” from the menu.

Enter a new name for the wiki and click “Save.”

The wiki tab will be renamed immediately.

The wiki in Microsoft Teams is not complicated, but it’s not supposed to be. Instead, Microsoft has created a wiki experience that is pretty intuitive whilst allowing you to build up a complex body of information.