Chat with others in Microsoft Teams

Start a chat with another person

Select New message at the top of your list of chats and channels.
Enter a person’s name.
Compose your message in the box at the bottom of the chat.
To open formatting options, select Format to the right of your message.
When your message is ready, select Send or press Enter to start the chat.

You can also start a one-on-one chat from someone's profile card. Open it by choosing their picture in a channel or finding their name using the Search box.

Start a chat with yourself

You can start a chat with yourself in Teams. Compose your message just as you would in a regular one-on-one chat. Use your chat space for drafts, to send messages and files to yourself, or to get to know chat features a little better. You can drag your chat with yourself to the top of the Favorites section for easy reference.

Start and name a group chat

A group chat includes multiple people in a conversation. Create a group chat the same way you start a one-on-one chat.

Select New message at the top of your list of chats and channels.
Select the down arrow to the far right of To to reveal the Group name section.
Type a group name.
Type the names of the people you’d like to add in the To section.

This starts a new conversation. Everyone who has access to the group chat can send messages.

You can include up to 250 people in a group chat.

Note: Some of the features above are part of the public preview program and might undergo further changes before being released publicly. To get access to this and other upcoming features, switch to Teams public preview.

Add people to the conversation

To add people to a group chat, select View and add participants > Add people.
Type the names of the people you'd like to chat with. If it is an existing group chat, you can also choose how much of the chat history to include.
Select Add to add them to the conversation.

Notes:

You can include chat history only when adding someone to an existing group chat, not for a one-on-one.
Teams saves the entire chat history, all the way back to the first message. If someone leaves the group, their chat responses remain in your chat history.

See who's in a group chat

To see who’s in a group chat, select View and add participants Add participants icon in the top right corner. This will show a list of everyone’s names.