Microsoft finally announces this highly-anticipated Teams feature to enhance your communication, and more

Microsoft announced some major new features for the Teams chat and channel experience towards the end of last month. However, those weren’t meant to address any of the burning complaints users have with Teams. The software giant hasn’t made the same mistake this time: the company took into account what users have been asking for and has finally announced the ability to set tomorrow’s messages today.

Microsoft announces message scheduling for Teams Channels

There are some solid reasons to choose Microsoft Teams over Slack as your collaboration tool. That said, Teams still lacks a number of handy tools that you’ll find on rival platforms like Slack, one of them being the ability to schedule your messages on channels. A number of users on the Microsoft Community website have asked how they can use the feature in Teams. The query was viewed 17,288 times at the time of writing, making it one of the most sought-after Teams features. Well, the wait is almost over.

On its roadmap website, Microsoft has announced that it’ll introduce the much-requested message scheduling feature in Teams channels in January next year (Feature ID: 467447). This isn’t entirely new for Teams users, though. In fact, Teams can already use this feature, but it’s limited to chat. From January onwards, just like in chat, Teams channels will allow you to write a message well in advance and set it to be sent at a specific date and time.

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Moreover, there are a few more useful tools that Microsoft is planning to add to Teams in the near future. Next month, Teams users likely get access to “Copilot agents” in group chats (Feature ID: 464988). However, it doesn’t explicitly say much about how users will benefit from it. Also coming in December is a “Math Progress” feature for students and teachers (Feature ID: 466737). Again, no mention of how it will help students and teachers.

Image Credit: Microsoft

What new features are coming to Excel

Microsoft added a bunch of new features to Excel last month, and there are more in the pipeline for this month. One of the changes you’ll see by the end of this month is improved Forms integration in the Excel desktop app. According to Feature ID: 466743, Excel desktop users will be able to get up-to-date form response data in their workbooks, thanks to the new data sync connection capability. Microsoft first announced Forms data sync back in January this year, but only for Excel web users. This limitation will soon go away.

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What’s in it for Outlook users

One of the noteworthy features coming soon to Outlook is support for name pronunciation on profile cards. It’ll allow you to record and share the correct pronunciation of your name, saving your colleagues from mispronunciation of your name. This will be available in January next year, with the preview starting this month, as per (Feature ID: 465000).

If you’re using Outlook on iOS and Android, Microsoft has something for you as well. Outlook for Android and iOS will soon get the ability to add emails as attachments while composing an email (Feature ID: 464206). This will eliminate the need for you to forward emails individually, saving you time.

Microsoft may delay some features

All these changes should arrive by the end of January next year if you go by the roadmap website. However, the release timelines mentioned on the roadmap page are always subject to change. In other words, Microsoft might delay some of the features to later months if things go wrong. So, if you don’t see any of the above capabilities arriving on time, don’t be surprised.