5 Incredible Slack tips that will make you a pro

What distinguishes a Slack noob from a Slack pro? A few tricks of the trade will help you reach the pro status!

@here vs @channel

This is one of the main tips anyone can give you about Slack. Never mix up @here and @channel and ensure that you only use the latter when absolutely necessary.

@channel is a way of getting everyone’s attention by sending a forced notification to absolutely everyone around the globe. Yes, people will receive the notification even if they are under snooze time.

@here will notify only those who are active at the moment. This is the polite way of calling for attention and you should almost always use this option.

Custom Notifications

You can adjust the settings on a channel to allow for custom notifications depending on your needs.

Depending on the topic, priority or overall importance of the channel to you, you’re able to fully customize notifications for your Desktop application as well as for you mobile.

To reach the menu all you have to do is to right click the name of the channel in the sidebar and select “Change Notifications”

This simple trick will make the world of difference as the number of channels grows and you need to decide what requires your immediate attention.

Sections

An absolute killer Slack tip that came out in a 2020 release was the ability to add sections to your sidebar.

As the channel list continues to grow you need to be able to sort them by subject, group by topic, or any other sorting method that you find appropriate.

Before this release you had all the following possible combinations for creating sections: direct messages vs channels, starred vs non-starred.

You would then be able to sort within the starred/non-starred by channel, number of times you use the channel or alphabetically.

There’s also the possibility of moving a channel to a section by right clicking the channel name in the sidebar and selecting Move conversation.

The 2020 release came to revolutionize the world of every Slack user with more than 50 channels, direct messages, and group messages in their sidebar.

Note that this is an enterprise feature.

Integrations

As you start getting more accustomed to Slack you’ll find that you’re life would be so much easier if only you could … in Slack. Good news is that you probably can!

Slack has several integrations with multiple providers that will make your life so much simpler and happier. Why happier? Add the Giphy integration and just type /giphy Michael Scott

The same way you add a simple integration with Giphy you can also integrate with your work tools like Google Drive, Atlassian JIRA, Atlassian Trello, GitLab, GitHub, BlueJeans, Zoom, etc.

You can add a new integration by going into Apps in the sidebar and select from the ones you have available.

Convert Conversation into Private Channel

Finally, one of the most useful tips I give to every new Slack user is that they can migrate a group conversation into a private channel by a simple click of a button.

Why is this relevant? How many times have we been in conversations that have gone back and forth during a long time only to find out that the key person was not added to the conversation. We would then need to create a new conversation, copy the entirety of the previous conversation and paste into the new one just to keep everyone informed.

You can convert the group into a channel by opening the conversation, selecting the name of the conversation on top (usually has the participants names), go to the right sidebar and select Convert to a private channel.

Check out my video on 5 Tips to make you a pro on Slack on YouTube and be sure to leave a like on the video 😉

Thank you for reading up to this point! 😃 This is one of several articles I have on the blog focused on retrospectives, agile, productivity, and leadership. Be sure to scroll a bit through the website and if you want content delivered through video be sure to check out the link on the menu above.

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See you next time! ✌️💪
Parada

Originally published at https://luisparada.com on August 4, 2020.