How to Use Slack

Key Takeaways

hey everyone in today's video i want to show you exactly how to use slack and i want to show you here on the mobile app because it's one of the easiest way to get started and if you're not familiar with slack it's basically a communication platform for sending text videos files and it's mostly used for work it's kind of a better way than using email and that's how most people use it we'll just go ahead and set up an account here on the android phone i have an iphone here it's pretty much identical but then i'll show you my real account here on the iphone once we set up an account here on slack and just to give you an idea on the size of the company slack it was started back in 2013 and in 2021 they sold it to salesforce for 27 billion dollars and if you use it on the app here or at slack.com or the desktop version on mac and pc you could get started completely for free they do have some paid upgrades here so you could go to the website at slack.com click on pricing and kind of get an understanding of what the paid upgrades are but i'm going to cover everything here that's completely free so on iphone or android look up slack in the google play store here i'm going to go ahead and open it up and if you don't have an account yet this is what it's going to look like for you so i'm just going to go ahead and press get started here and here you need to use an email here so you could use your work email as an example and then it's going to send you an email to set up your account so i'm going to go ahead and do that and this is where it should bring you once you set it up this way but if it doesn't i'll show you in a second how to set up a workspace if you are not already in one but just to give you an overview here on the app right here on the bottom you have your menu and i'm on the home page here and yours if you set it up yourself may be empty there may be no channels besides the general channel there may be no direct messages but before we go through this let me kind of explain if you go up here and press this option right here this profile icon this is really the very first page of the app it's called workspaces and if you're just part of one company you probably only have one workspace so this is the one i typically use and then i use this for some other projects like creating apps and working with my team there so between these two i could jump between each one if you have a company and then you work for another company and you use slack for managing your family's affairs you could also have many workspaces so the very first thing is workspaces to add one you could just add one from here so press add workspace and then you could go ahead and either sign into existing workspaces so i have some other ones that i've set up previously or i could sign in into another workspace that's not showing up here i could also join another workspace or create my own but creating one this is if you have your own company for example and you want to create one all you have to do is press create again choose an email here and then it's going to let you name your company or your team here and then you could type in the type of project that you're working on so app maybe that's what i'm designing here press next and then on this page it's going to ask you to add team members because slack is really not useful by yourself right it's a communication platform so you need at least one more person so here you could share a link add from your contacts or send an email to someone so if you share a link it's going to let you share it via the normal options on ios here on the iphone or android here now if i go back to this page by pressing this h option now you can see i created another workspace here now i have three right so i'm going to go back to one i use all the time which is this one here and i'll show you exactly how to actually use slack now that is fully set up so remember anytime you could press h to jump between workspaces and create new ones if you only have one then you don't have to really worry about the space so i'm gonna just slide over to the home page here now typically the very second thing i do after joining or creating a workspace is i add teammates right so you see some of my teammates here on this platform so i'm going to press add teammate and you need to send them an email invite here or again you have the usual options like copying link is available as well and you could let the link actually expire so if someone gets a hold of it that shouldn't they can't actually join this way it's just a security function but i usually use an email here and send a person an email and then they could sign up for slack here so workspace step two is adding teammates and then the teammates will start appearing over here and this is just direct messages this is just like using a text message right so you could jump into any person's name here and then type out a direct message here and then press send i'll go more over on the direct messages and all your options here in a second so let me go back what i really want to cover before going deeper into direct messages is right here channels now channels is really why slack is so powerful with channels you could set up channels on specific categories or tasks or projects and then you could invite only who you want in that channel not everyone in your team here is everyone in your team okay everyone on the slack workspace but in individual channels is only who you invite into them so let's go ahead and create one so i could press the plus sign to create a channel and then i could go create one or choose from the existing ones so if i create one let's call this budget and then description you could give it a description and make channel private when a channel is set to private members of your workspace can only view or join it by invitation so typically this makes sense for a lot of different channels you want it to be private and not open to everyone in your workspace here just who you're going to invite then press create and some channels could be open right so if you have a general communication channel maybe anybody could join they don't need an invite now i'm the only one in this channel to add someone i press add add to this channel it says you'll be able to see a channel history in all shared files so i do want to add a member it says i'm already in the channel but i'm going to invite someone else here and then press add now they have to accept my invitation here and then both of us are going to be in this channel let me go back to a channel that is more public so the ones that have a little hashtag that means this channel is public meaning public to my workspace not public to external use but budget is private within my workspace none of these people except andrew who i just invited can see that so let me go to quick tech here so this option right here what i'm going to show you andrew's already is in channel you could see two members right here i could always click on top to get a better understanding of this channel and everything about it here and if i go back i could go ahead and communicate using this message tab within this channel so however many members even if it's 200 members here they'll all be able to see what's going on over here so i'll cover some of the things you could do here so as an example you could always type in text here this is just like a text message so if you send it everyone in this group could see that and then you have some options over here so this option for example lets you invite someone else to this channel and a bunch of other options here that are a little more advanced for a beginner's guide but you could explore that you have a simple emoji here that you could send emojis the admission is great because you could just get someone's attention so if there is like 50 people on this channel i could use the at sign and just choose andrew so then it's directly talking to andrew now you could do this outside of channels on one-on-one conversations but this is really great within channels when you're addressing someone so use this as much as you can and then this option just gives you some formatting options especially adding links or bolding things comes in really handy here let me go back on that then this option right here lets you actually send screenshots which comes in really useful using the files on your phone or if you use the desktop version you could use that then you could also give it access to photos again if you haven't yet i'm going to keep the current selection and that's pretty much everything that there is here you could always expand this to be bigger too if you need more real estate here for typing and sending files you also have this section besides channels so again just to recap channels could be set to private so only people that are part of your workspace that are invited could see it or they could be open here okay and not private and anybody here that is part of your workspace could see it external people still can't see these right they have to be part of your workspace then you have this option right here for direct messages so if i just wanted to talk to andrew here and not in this channel i could jump in here and then have a direct message conversation and this has the exact same option that we have inside of a channel so you don't have to actually know anything new here you do have an option though to make a phone call and if you press this option it's going to actually access your microphone and create a voice call and the thread option basically shows you everything that's going on so if you go there it's going to basically show you all your conversation in one easy to see place rather than jumping between all your channels this is basically everything that is related to you and you could always press jump 2 right up here and then you could jump to any place you want to including what you've done recently your history all that makes it easier to do a search and jump into that section because this may get really really crowded with a lot of people here so you may just want to keep this minimized and use the search option the jump to option or this little pencil icon to create a message from there okay so so far that's all in the home page let's go to direct messages here and direct messages is basically what i just kind of compressed on the home page where you could just have one-on-one conversation here with anyone so you could jump into conversation what i just showed you previously now the mentions this is when someone uses the ad sign and talks to you directly inside of a channel or in a direct message they'll all appear over here so this is very useful because then here you could see exactly who's mentioning you and the reactions all in one page let's go to search this comes in really handy because you could go ahead and search for channels browse channels browse people search by email very useful page here once things get really crowded so this is a better use of slack than what email is because searching for things is a little bit easier you could search for messages files everything using the search option it comes in really really handy the you page here is very useful because you could set a status for yourself but more importantly when you're away you could set yourself to a way so people don't message you because they know you're away right so this is active this is a way really useful and you could pause notifications too so if you're off work you go ahead and pause notifications for a specific amount of time here and i'll show you one advanced setting here that comes in handy but if you go to preferences here you could actually integrate with other apps so i actually integrated with zoom on my slack but that's a little bit more advanced but i do want to point it out because it does come in handy slacks integrates with a lot of different apps here that is helpful to point out so you could kind of see that over here microsoft teams loom asana so make sure you explore this a little bit if you're not getting what you want out of slack and you need to incorporate other things into it let me go back here when you do get a message in a workspace also you get a little indicator here that you have an unread message which comes in really really handy and finally back on the you page what i wanted to show you is i never set a profile picture so it's really handy to add a profile picture you could go ahead and press view profile here and then you could edit your profile on this page and you could go ahead and press that picture icon and set a profile picture and a little bit about yourself including a contact phone number if you like and that's your crash course on using slack on mobile devices if you want to learn more about slack.com and the desktop app for mac and pc i will link a video about that in the description below but i think this is a better way to get started with the mobile app and then you could use the desktop app at work pretty much all the basics apply but it's a little bit of a different layout so watch that video if you want to master that as well thanks so much for all your time please give this a thumbs up and i'll see you next time