Tired of spending all of your time in your email inbox? Slack helps you say goodbye to email while keeping all of your teams’ communications and files in one place, wherever you go. You can group conversations, share files and search while staying in sync across multiple platforms. It also has dozens of integrations with third party applications and is a secure way to communicate.

Shortcuts are a type of element in Slack clients that invoke a helpful action. Apps can create their own shortcuts and use them as a trigger for interactive workflows. When someone uses one of your shortcuts, your app will receive some context about what happened in an interaction payload. Create issues from Slack - Create issues in Jira directly from Slack, in the context of a conversation; Interact with issues from Slack - Transition, assign, comment on, and watch issues right from Slack. Atlassian and Slack are committed to building deep and powerful integrations that enable teams to collaborate and iterate quickly. Slack’s free mode limits app integrations to 10. This roadblock goes away in the paid plans, and businesses can take full advantage of Slack’s more than 2,400 app integration possibilities.

Companies, big and small, are moving to this new tool for communication, including Productivityist. I’ve personally used this tool with multiple teams and continue to find more reasons why it’s my favorite messaging app.

Here are seven of my favorite tips and tricks to help make Slack easier and better to use.

Slack also has a few small resizing options you should know about, which can come in handy when you want to maximize screen real estate. Press Ctrl + Shift + D on Windows or Command + Shift + D on a Mac to collapse or show the sidebar. Slack Slack is a team communication tool, that brings together all of your team communications in one place, instantly searchable and available wherever you go.

1. Notify Individuals (@username)

One of the easiest and quickest tips for Slack is the ability to mention people in your messages. Just like Twitter, everyone on your team has a unique username prepended by the @ sign. If you want to mention someone in a message, type the @ sign and Slack will give you a popup of available users you can choose from; continue typing to autocomplete the user of your choice.

Furthermore, if you want to notify everyone in a channel or group you can type @channel and everyone will be notified of the message.

2. Quick Commands (/command)

Slack is often used for sharing messages, links, and files but there is much more to this app; Slack also has built-in and third party commands that allow you to interact with the app at a deeper level. All commands in Slack are initiated by a forward slash (/) at the beginning of your message. You will immediately see a popup of all available commands and can choose the one you want by typing the keyword for the appropriate command.

Here are some examples:

• /mute – mutes the current channel.
• /away – toggle your away status.
• /collapse – collapse all files in the current channel (/expand does the opposite).
• /invite @username – Invite another member to a channel or group.

Slack makes it easy because it autocompletes the command as you type and shows a description next to the keyword.

3. Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to increase productivity and quickly navigate and interact with any application. Slack has a great set of keyboard shortcuts for navigation, messages and more.

Here are a list of shortcuts I use everyday:

• Cmd / – Display all of Slack’s keyboard shortcuts.
• Cmd k – Open the Quick Switcher.
• Cmd u – Upload a file.
• Cmd , – Open Slack’s settings.

My favorite and most used shortcut is the “Quick Switcher” which opens with ⌘+K or ⌘+T (or Ctrl + K for Windows). It pulls up a search form that displays all unread channels, groups and private messages followed by a complete list of everything else. Simply type what area of your team you want to visit and hit enter. It’s an easy way to jump between conversations and view unread channels in a quick glance.

Ready to dive deeper into Slack? Then check out the new Productivityist course (built right inside of Slack) called Slack Made Easy. You can learn more about Slack Made Easy here.

4. Multiple Teams

Did you know you aren’t limited to one team with Slack? There are many companies and communities moving to Slack for team communication. Slack allows you to easily add multiple teams to your app.

You can switch between apps using the small sidebar on the right (or inside the menu on mobile). You can also switch using keyboard shortcuts displayed between each of your team icons (ex: ⌘+1). Combine team switching with the Quick Switcher utility and it becomes quick and easy to hold conversations between multiple channels with multiple teams.

5. Custom Themes

If you start using multiple teams, you will want to have a way to easily identify communication between teams. To help you with this, Slack allows you to customize the colors of your sidebar. In the settings there is a section called “Sidebar Theme” with a set of premade themes that have unique color palettes.

The real power house behind Slacks Sidebar Theme is the ability to create your own color themes. Click the link at the bottom and you can adjust whatever colors you want using their color picker or your own hexadecimal color value. I would recommend matching the Sidebar Theme with your company’s colors. For Productivityist Slack group, Choco Mint is the theme with a replacement of all the greens with Productivityist green.

This makes Slack feel personal and unique for each team you participate in, and the theme carries across all devices, so just make the update once and everything changes. Lastly, you can share your theme by copying the hexadecimal codes (from the bottom for of the Sidebar Theme settings) and even share it with your teammates.

6. Customize Notification Preferences

Slack isn’t intended to be a new instant messaging platform to keep you connected with your team. Rather, it’s supposed to be a smarter way to communicate on a team.

This is why the notification settings are critical when setting up Slack. I suggest using Slack’s recommended settings. It allows you to get notifications for @channel messages and responses from messages you directed or are mentioned in. These settings eliminate worry about missing important messages, without your phone or computer going off all day with less important conversations.

7. Emoji Reactions

A new feature introduced by the Slack team allows you to “react” to someone’s message with a emoticon. You can type +:emoji_name: or hit Cmd+Shift+ to pull up a popup containing a list of emoji to interact with a message. On mobile you can tap and hold the message you want to react to and hit the “Add Reaction” link.

Emoji reactions are a simple but clever way to connect with what others are saying. It’s another reason why Slack is fun and forward thinking with their app.

Conclusion

These are just a handful of tips for working with Slack. This application has transformed the way Productivityist team communicates and we think it can help your team as well. Mike has teamed up with Steve Dotto to create a new course – administered in Slack – called Slack Made Easy. Plus, this is an active community; the course will continue to grow as the community grows. The Productivityist​ team members that built it – including Mike Vardy – along with Dotto Tech​ are in there so you’ll have direct access to them! You can learn more about Slack Made Easy and get enrolled today by clicking here.

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Slack is a team communication tool, that brings together all of your team communications in one place, instantly searchable and available wherever you go.

This connector is available in the following products and regions:

Known Issues and Limitations

1. As per the Slack API documentation, some Slack API methods that the connector uses will stop functioning in February 2021 and will not work with newly created apps after June 10th, 2020. So please use latest versions of below actions.

   Actions:

2. Create a group is deprecated, please use latest version of Create a channel to create private channels.

3. The maximum number of characters in a message is limited to 4000. For more details, please refer to Slack's official documentation.

Connector in-depth

For more information about the connector, see the in-dept section.

Throttling Limits

Actions

Create a channel

Create a channel in slack.

Parameters

Returns

Create a channel [DEPRECATED]

This action has been deprecated. Please use Create a channel instead.

Create a channel in slack.

Parameters

Returns

Create a group [DEPRECATED]

Creates a group in slack.

Parameters

Returns

Join a channel [DEPRECATED]

This action has been deprecated. Please use Join a public channel instead.

Join a channel in slack.

Parameters

Returns

Join a public channel

Join a public channel in slack.

Parameters

Returns

List channels [DEPRECATED]

This action has been deprecated. Please use List public channels (Pagination support) instead.

List the channels in slack.

Returns

List public channels

List the public channels in slack.

Returns

List public channels (Pagination support) (Preview)

List the public channels in slack.

Returns

Post message (V2)

This operation is used to post a message to the specified channel.

Parameters

Returns

Details of the message posted to a Slack channel.

Post message [DEPRECATED]

This action has been deprecated. Please use Post message (V2) instead.

This operation is used to post a message to the specified channel.

In Slack Season

Parameters

Returns

Set do not disturb

Set the do not disturb status for the user.

Parameters

Returns

Triggers

When a file is created

When a file is created

Parameters

Returns

Definitions

Channel

The Channel

ListChannels_Response

ListChannels_ResponseV3

CreateChannel_Response

JoinChannel_Response

Poll In Slack

JoinChannel_ResponseV2

PostMessageResponse

In Slack

Details of the message posted to a Slack channel.