Teams: Ctrl+E to search, and jump anywhere from there

Clicking your way through Teams' sidebar to find a person, channel, or file is slow — especially at a company with dozens of teams and hundreds of coworkers. There's a faster route that works from anywhere in the app and doesn't even require touching the mouse.

A typical scenario

You need to quickly message a coworker from another department you last chatted with a month ago. The usual route: search for her in the team list, click through shared channels, or scroll down through your chat history until you spot her. Finding her takes half a minute, and the thought you wanted to send her is half-forgotten by the time you do.

With search, it's one keystroke and a few letters of a name — the conversation opens before you'd even have had time to reach for the mouse.

How to do it

1. Press Ctrl + E from anywhere in the app — the cursor jumps straight into the search bar at the top, no clicking required.
2. Start typing your coworker's name, a team or channel name, or even part of a text you remember from a message or file.
3. Results split into tabs: Messages, People, Files — switch between them to see exactly where the content you're looking for actually lives.
4. Clicking (or using the arrow keys and Enter) on a result opens the relevant chat, channel, or document directly — no need to hunt for which team it belongs to.
5. You can also type a slash / followed by a command in the same field — Teams uses this to launch quick actions, like changing your status or opening a specific app, without having to find the right menu.
6. Search also works across your entire conversation history, so it's handy for tracking down a message or file from weeks ago that you only remember a fragment of.

The best tools

• Teams' built-in search (Ctrl+E) — the fastest way to reach anything in the app, no extra installation needed.
• Slash commands (/) right in the search bar — a shortcut for common actions, like changing your status or opening your calendar.
• Search in Outlook for the same principle with email, if your company uses Teams and Outlook together — the “shortcut instead of clicking around” habit carries over between apps.
• A global launcher like PowerToys Run or Spotlight on macOS, if you want equally fast search outside of Teams, across your whole computer.

What you get out of it

• Time: an estimated 3–5 minutes a day, since you're not clicking through the sidebar and scrolling team and channel lists.
• A preserved train of thought: finding a person or file faster means you write the message before you forget what you wanted to say.
• Fewer extra open windows: search opens the target chat or document directly, so you don't end up with five open tabs before finding the right one.
• A habit that transfers everywhere: a keyboard shortcut for quick search is standard across apps (Slack, Outlook, browsers) — a reflex learned once saves time elsewhere too.

Pro tip

If you're looking for a specific file rather than a person or message, switch straight to the Files tab in the search results — Teams also searches the contents of documents stored in linked teams, not just their names, so you'll find a file even if you don't remember its exact name.