10 Tips and Tricks to Get Up to Speed With Slack Collaboration App

Slack, the team collaboration application, has become a new option for companies and workgroups to communicate and share ideas. In October, the company announced that it now has more than 4 million daily users and 1.25 million companies paying for its service. It’s achieved that growth by providing an alternative to email, improving communication among employees and enabling workgroups to collaborate on specific projects. But not everyone is necessarily a Slack whiz. There are a variety of hacks users can learn to get more productive faster when using Slack. This slide show presents 10 Slack tips to help to get up to speed with the Slack platform. The tips were compiled by from GetCRM, an independent customer relationship management product comparison resource.

Search is a great way to find archived content in Slack. Using an asterisk after a partial word brings up anything that might be related to the term. Using a slash command, users can search through Slack from the message box.

To convert long paragraphs of content into neat lists in Slack, users can add a number to a line break and the app will do the rest. Users also can put an asterisk in front of and after words in a paragraph to bold them.

Slack includes an edit feature for historical posts, but clicking on it and choosing edit from the menu is time-consuming. Instead, users can press the up arrow key after publishing a message, which will allow them to edit the message.

The Slack ecosystem has a growing number of third-party apps that can be integrated into its channels. GetCRM users, for instance, can install a Twitter app to keep track of mentions and updates as a way to boost social tracking.

Sharing a quote from another team member is a great way to quickly provide context about a message. Users can simply copy and paste the other person’s timestamp link into their own message and whatever that person said will be quoted for additional context.

Slack comes with a host of keyboard shortcuts to help users be more productive. Holding down control-U lets users quickly upload files. Control-shift-K gives users access to the Direct Messages menu. Holding control-shift-A will open all unread messages.

Slack comes with a little-used feature that lets users set tags for custom notifications. With the feature, users can tag words and phrases to be alerted when someone in the channel includes them in a message. You can do the same for usernames.

With Slack’s Customize Slackbot option, companies can add questions, phrases and answers to frequently asked questions. Whenever someone asks one of those questions or mentions one of those phrases, Slackbot will automatically deliver a response.

Slack supports If This, Then That, or IFTTT operators. Through the service, users can create custom command chains that automate tasks whenever an action is performed in the app. For example, the feature can be used to trigger a companywide announcement before a meeting is held.

Again, Slackbot can be helpful. From the Slack message box, users can type, “/remind” and Slackbot will automatically provide an update based on the context of the command. Those who type in “/remind me to in 10 minutes to check my mail” will get that alert from Slackbot at the requested time.