One of the main disadvantages of using Microsoft Teams chats versus conducting conversations in a Teams channel is the formatting of conversations and the ability to reply directly. The formatting of the conversations in Teams channels makes conversations among several folks easier to follow. A long-overdue new feature in Teams allows you to directly reply to specific messages in Chat conversations, which is really handy if you have a small chat going among a few folks.

If you want to reply directly and quote a message to make it more obvious what you’re replying to to give things a bit more context, it’s pretty straight forward. First find the message you want to quote and reply to, hover over it, click on the three-dot menu, and then click “Reply”

The message will quoted in your reply. You can then type your reply as usual and hit send:

You can also quote multiple messages by repeating the three-dot “Reply” step for each message you want to quote. It will put all your quotes into one reply, that you can then add-to and hit send:

When you see a reply to a specific message in your Chat, you can click on the quoted message to automatically scroll back up to the location of that particular message in your chain.

This feature is currently support in the various desktop/mobile clients but it currently not supported in the browser-based version of Teams.

Images courtesy Microsoft.