A quick tour of Slack - Slack Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's take a quick tour of the basic features of Slack. If I look here at the top of the page, I have a History button, which lets me see where I have been recently. So if I want to go back to a channel I was in a little bit ago, I can find it here. A search box that lets me search within Slack for messages, files, channels, people, by entering some text, and it also keeps track of my recent searches. The Help button gives me some help features, the last of which are keyboard shortcuts, which I can also fire up with Ctrl + slash, and I have a list of all these shortcuts that work throughout Slack. On the left-hand side, this is my KinetEco workspace. If I click to open it, I can see how many messages I have, I can see information about my plan, invite other coworkers to this workspace, set some preferences, create a new channel. This is also where I would sign out if I were working on Slack on a public computer and came to the end of my session. I have an unreads list, and the items that are on here are really the types of posts that I might have in Slack. So I can see that I have some unread direct messages, DMs, because all DMs is bold. If I click More, I have access to a channel browser, a file browser, people in user groups, in apps, and this list is customizable. Below this, I have a list of channels. And when I dropped in, I dropped into the general channel, which is the default channel. A channel is a specific conversation space in Slack. I can tell that I have new messages in a channel, because, like all DMs, it's name will be bold. The general channel is, in some ways, the default channel in Slack, because every single person in this workspace, is automatically added to the general channel. So this is where we might post company-wide announcements. If I want to go to a different channel, I simply click on it to go to that channel. You might notice that the general channel is preceded by a hashtag. It's a public channel. Budget2022 is a private channel, and it's icon is a lock. There are other channels that I could join, but this is all of the channels that I've joined so far here in Slack. Below the channel list are direct message groups. Each of these is a private conversation that I'm having with one or with more people. And if I want to leave myself a note, I can actually do that by sending myself a direct message. It's not always a bad thing to talk to yourself if you're in Slack. I'm going to return to the general channel. The channel and its posts and content are displayed in all of this white space down the center of the page. Here's the channel name, and this star allows me to star the channel. And when I do, that channel is moved to a new list above the channels list called Starred. This is actually how I prioritize the channels that I use a lot, making them easy to find. If I want to remove it, simply turn it back off, just like that. If I click the channel name, a details pane for the channel opens at the right-hand side. And this is where I could add people, find content only in this channel, as opposed to the search box at the top that searches the whole work space; make a call, change notifications, jump to a date, lots of other options. Information about the channel, when it was created, what it's for, who the members are, they're also displayed here at the top. Shortcuts, items that are pinned in the channel, and files that are associated with this channel, so all my channel tools are here on the right. To close that pane, that details pane, I simply click here. At the bottom, I have a message box, and it's been here since I clicked on the channel. This is where I would type text to be able to post it here to this channel so that everyone in the general channel could see it. We'll talk about all of these features as we are using Slack. If you're on a public computer, it would be a good practice to sign out of this workspace and close your browser. You would do that by clicking on the workspace name and choosing to sign out of the workspace. But I'm going to simply stay logged in, and I hope you will, too.